- [Thomas] This video is sponsored by Skillshare,
where you can take my two classes
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Be one of the first 500 people to sign up
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(thunder rumbling)
(light suspenseful music)
- Hey.
- What?
- Here.
- Thanks.
(energizing music)
All right.
- But I have noticed
that they've already started to become my own.
One for when to say yes to checklists,
and another for how I pack.
(overlapping voices chattering)
Now I need you to stay with me here.
It's a checklist.
- (fingers snapping) That's what I was doing.
- So, recently my friend Matt D'avella put out this video
called, "This Productivity System Will Save Your Life"
which was all about checklists
and how using them can help you
become a lot more effective in your work.
And I'll be honest, it's a great video.
It's expertly made as always,
and it introduces the topic perfectly well.
That being said,
I think there's an area in Matt's video
that deserves a bit of expansion.
See, there are two types of checklists.
The kind you quickly write out
when you're just brain dumping a few things you need to do,
or getting ready to go grocery shopping
and need to know what to buy.
And then the much more impactful type
on which Matt's video focuses.
These are the checklists followed by astronauts, surgeons,
and anyone else's work that consists of lots of complex,
multi-step processes that are repeated for each new job.
The checklists these people use are,
as the author Greg McKeown points out in Matt's video,
based on observations of an established process
and refined over time.
Another crucial point about them,
they aren't written out from scratch each time they're used.
In other words,
the checklists that are used by professionals
are typically copies that are based on templates.
A template is essentially a master version of a checklist
that's usually not used or written on.
Instead, every time it's needed, a copy is made,
and that copy is where you do your actual checking.
Now I say usually because the advent of computers
has made it easier to work directly off the master list.
And that's what some people, including Matt, actually do.
And here's a bit more context on that.
- Hey Thomas, thanks so much for thinking of me, man.
I'm excited that I'm not the only one that geeks out
about this kind of stuff.
So, when it comes to the checklist that I make,
I store all of them on Apple Notes.
I've got Apple Notes open right here.
These are my like five or six checklists
that I use most frequently.
This first one right here is actually for taxes.
If this could get any more boring.
I have one that's called "Should I Say Yes?"
Of course I have a travel checklist,
and then there are those checklists
that are just very complicated
and help me out for really tricky tasks and tricky projects.
I actually don't duplicate these.
I don't print it out and check 'em off.
I just check and uncheck 'em.
At the end of the day, I'll go back in
and I will uncheck each one.
And this is usually,
I usually just do this before my next trip.
I'll go back in before my next trip,
and I will uncheck everything
and then start that process over from scratch.
For me, it's really about finding
the least friction possible,
finding a system that works well for me using Apple Notes
and using these pre-created templates in there
that I've made have really helped me out a lot.
- So, Matt's system is proof that simply working off
of the master checklist can work pretty well.
As long as you're using an app that makes it really easy
to uncheck your tasks once you're done.
It's much better than writing out your checklists
from scratch each time
which, for complex tasks, can be prone to error,
and is only slightly better
than trying to go off of memory alone.
Still I think creating copies
from a template list can often work better.
For one thing, making copies allows you
to work on multiple projects at the same time.
Say batching filming tasks at one location
that will be used for two upcoming videos,
and it also saves you from having to spend the time
unchecking dozens of tasks at the end of the day.
Now Matt's video does touch on making copies briefly
when he mentions that Greg
likes to print out his checklists.
But I want to expand on this idea a little bit more
and show you some methods that I think work even better.
And keep this in mind,
by the end of this video,
you're gonna wanna be using templates
for more than just checklists,
at least if I've done my job correctly,
because in truth, I'm just using checklists as an example
to introduce the topic of templates as a whole.
From research, to music production,
to film making and beyond,
professionals rely on templates
to help them create useful starting points for their work
every single day.
Take a mixing engineer, for example.
If the engineer knows he'll be working
with recordings of drums, guitars, vocals and more,
he's probably going to build a project template
that lets him start with pre-made tracks
for all those things.
In fact, most engineers actually have templates
that go way beyond that;
with additional tracks for effects in place as well.
And if you can master
how to use templates in your own work,
you'll save a ton of time and be a lot more productive.
But for now, let's just talk about checklists.
Now like I said before,
you could just make paper printouts of your checklists
and work off of those.
But why do a job on paper that's so much more easily done
on a phone or on a computer?
In fact, I think we're hurting these trees' feelings
even talking about that.
So, let's talk about some additional ways
that you can make copies of your checklist templates.
I wanna show you a couple of quick demos
in two different apps.
Though it must be noted that a lot of task management apps
do have the ability to create templates,
and as you learned from Matt,
you can even do the exact same thing
in a lot of note taking apps
provided that they have a checklist feature.
That being said, let's look at what is probably
my favorite completely free task management application,
which is Microsoft To Do.
Now the astute viewers in my audience
who have seen a lot of my to-do list app feature videos
probably know that I am a Todoist user
and indeed I do still use Todoist.
But it has to be said that compared to Microsoft To Do's
desktop app and their web browser app,
Todoist actually isn't as good at creating templates.
Microsoft To Do has some great templating features.
Their Mac app, which is now in the Mac Store,
doesn't have these templating features,
so if you're watching this, Microsoft,
please make your Mac app have feature parity
to the web browser version.
But that being said, here in Microsoft To Do,
I can easily select whatever tasks I want.
I can hit Command or Control to select specific tasks
or I can use Shift to select a range of tasks
and then I can just right-click
and I can copy tasks to any new project
that I'm building out.
I could also move them,
but because we're using a template here,
we don't wanna move things off, so we would wanna copy.
Or, even better,
if I haven't even created a new project yet,
I can just duplicate the entire template
over to a new thing that I can work from.
So, here I've got a templates folder that I built out,
I can keep it collapsed if I want to just hide it
or have it be out of the way most of time,
but when I need to use it, I can come in here,
I can grab one of these templates that I created.
So, let's say I'm going on a filming trip
and I have to pack lots of cameras and SD cards and stuff
in addition to nail clippers and razors,
I can just right-click, I can duplicate the list,
and then I can rename it,
I can move it to a new folder,
and I can work off it from there.
Check things off, we're totally good to go.
That being said, where I get the most value
out of checklist templates is actually in Notion
which is as I've talked about
many, many times on this channel,
one of my favorite productivity apps,
probably the most powerful one that I use.
So, I run basically my entire video production operation
out of Notion, and if you've seen my Notion video,
which I'll link to in the description below,
in case you haven't seen it,
I have a template that I create every single time
that I want to make a new video.
I'm just gonna show you briefly how that works,
because there are some checklist in there
that I've been able to use.
So, if I go here and I click Templates
and I click Project Template,
it spawns a brand new instance of a project template
that I can work from.
So let's just call this Test Project for brevity,
and I could fill these things out
but what I really wanna show you
are the checklists that it generates.
So, for editing,
we have a specific editing checklist that is generated anew
each time that we wanna make a brand-new video.
So, as we're working through the A-Cut,
through the B-Roll, through the second stage of B-Roll
which is much more animation heavy,
we can check things off as we go along.
We also have a publishing checklist,
which I find to be the most useful checklist
in this project template
because there are a lot of things I have to do
when I publish a new video to YouTube.
There are all these little tiny things,
and if I don't use a checklist,
I'm going to forget to do at least one of them,
because it's just such a detail-oriented process.
Now, remember earlier on in the video
when I said that you can use templates
for more than just checklists?
Well, Notion is a shining example
of how you can kinda go beyond just a basic template.
So for one example,
I wanna show you something that I've started doing recently.
I have this little To Do's area of my project template,
and in here, I'm actually using Notion's template block
to give me the option to generate a checklist
that actually lives somewhere else.
So, let me come out of this project template really quick,
and show you something that we've been building.
We have something called
the Knowledge Base in our Notion account,
and I've been building what's called
our Video Workflow Tutorial and eventually,
I'm going to have an entire document to process
for basically every single step
of our video creation process.
And some of those steps essentially involve checklists.
So, for an on-location shoot,
we have several different little mini-lists of gear
that we have to remember to bring,
but not every single video is shot on location;
a lot of them are done here in the studio.
So, I don't always need an instance of this checklist
and I wanted to live here in our documentation
just in case we hire somebody new,
they can easily go through this logical progression
of documentation and see what they need to do.
But if I go over to my Projects again,
I have the option of generating a gear checklist;
this just uses Notion's template block
to make a brand new version
and as you can see, I can check things off,
and they are not going to affect
the original version of that gear checklist.
So, you can have a checklist in your documents,
and then you can make new versions of it as you need.
And on that note, it's gotta be said
that there's a time and place for using checklist templates.
If you have just a few things you need to get done,
it's usually more effective
just to write out a quick checklist from scratch.
Not everything needs to be a template.
But if you find yourself going through complex,
multi-step processes on a regular basis,
creating a template can be incredibly helpful.
Now, using templates is one method
for making the way in which you use your checklists,
and indeed the entire way in which you work more efficient.
Now if you'd like to take things even further,
then you might wanna go check out
my Productivity Systems course on Skillshare.
Not only does it teach you my best methods
for organizing your Task Manager,
but it also covers calendars, note-taking systems,
file management systems,
and how to make them all work together
so nothing ever slips through the cracks in your life.
And guess what?
You can actually take it for free
by being one of the first 500 people
to sign up for Skillshare using the link below.
Doing that will get you a free two-month trial
with unlimited access to all of their classes,
which means you'll also be able to take
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along with thousands of others
covering entrepreneurship, productivity, graphic design,
music production and lots, lots more.
After the trial is over,
Skillshare is still incredibly affordable
at less than 10 bucks a month,
and personally, I think my two classes alone
are more than worth the price of admission there.
But I'm really happy to be able to offer them on a platform
that also gives you access to thousands of other classes
from so many great teachers.
So, be one of the first 500 to sign up with that link below,
grab that two-month free trial and start learning today.
And as always, thanks so much for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, definitely hit that like button
to let YouTube's algorithm know
that this content is worth watching
'cause we are putting a lot of work into it these days
and if you haven't already,
you might also wanna go follow me on Instagram
as I'm starting to post some in-progress thoughts
that eventually lead to videos,
and also some behind the scenes photos
and other content from the production of our videos
which I think you're gonna like
since we are really ramping up
the production quality of these videos.
Last but not least,
I'm gonna link to Matt's original video right over here,
definitely check that out if you haven't seen it already
and get subscribed to Matt's channel,
he makes amazing content.
And you also might wanna check out
this interview I did with him right over here
which digs into his own work processes,
the gear he uses and how he stays motivated.
I think you're really gonna like it.
So that is it, go do whatever you want, I'm not your dad,
but I will see you in the next video.