5 Reasons Why You Should Use Checklist

[#1]

Are you already using checklists to organize your tasks and improve the productivity of your team? You’ve probably heard of the effectiveness of checklists for time-management, task prioritizing, and ensuring you don’t skip any essential step, whether of your daily routine or project.

If you still hesitate about how checklists for repetitive tasks can boost your productivity and smooth the workflow, let’s have a look at the potential benefits of checklists. We’ll also dwell on how to create them in Jira and the functionality of the advanced checklist add-on - Recurring Checklists and Report. So, keep on reading!

 

Productivity

Unfortunately, recurring processes become a part of our routine, and very often, we do them automatically, paying not enough attention to every stage of the process. Routine is taken as “familiar”, thus, simple.

However, even if the task is repetitive and you’ve done it hundred times, it’s still an essential part of the workflow, and skipping or neglecting it may be harmful to the whole process. Checklists reassure all stages get equal attention from you and your team, so the workflow becomes seamless and easier.

Delegation

When creating a to-do list, you analyze your task, breaking it down into detailed steps, analyzing and prioritizing them. First of all, it gives you a clear plan of what exactly should be done to ensure success, and also, delegating minor tasks to your team while focusing on more essential ones.

Organization

The creation of a checklist for your one-time project or repetitive workflows will provide you as a manager with a clear vision of the steps to be taken and the exact actions to be done. It’s perhaps the simplest and most comfortable way to create an outline with full control over the project’s progress.

With a checklist, your team is strictly guided throughout the whole project, and you can easily track the completion of every step, making sure you get everything done what needs to be done.

Motivation

Routine tasks are very important, but more than 60% of employees claim they are boring. People don’t like to do something that dulls them. As you cannot get rid of the repetitive processes, you can still make them fun with the help of checklists.

How? Every completed checklist point gives us the feeling of success like we’ve achieved something. The brain releases the dopamine hormone, making us feel happier and more motivated. As simple as it is, checklists are an easy way to turn repetitive tasks your team hates into something that motivates them. Try it out!

Creativity

Repetitive tasks are time- and effort-consuming. They may demotivate and frustrate you or your team, leaving no energy for creativity and thinking outside the box. It definitely sounds so-so.

Don’t despair. Use checklists to free up space for creativity and fresh ideas. If you try checklists for your recurring processes, you’ll see that your team spends much less time completing these tasks and has more opportunities to focus on more essential and interesting things.

Jira checklists for your repetitive workflows

Well, now, when you know exactly how checklists can simplify the workflow and management process, let’s have a look at the tools that can help you with the checklist set up for your recurring processes.

If you have to create a new checklist for every routine task, it will become another repetitive and boring process. Fortunately, you can automate it with Jira so that the platform will automatically create the issue with predefined custom fields with checkbox type.

If you want to create a checklist inside the issues of the company-managed project, go to Project settings → Fields → Actions → Edit Fields → Custom fields → select Checkbox. Repeat this action for every Checkbox item you want to answer in the future.

For team-managed project: Project settings → Issues types →  place the Checkbox item on the issue layout. Repeat it for every question you have on your Checklist.

Voila! From now on, you’ll not have to waste time creating checklists for the same tasks. The issue layouts will always have selected fields.

Recurring Checklists and Report - advanced recurring tasks app

Once you’ve tried Jira’s checklist feature but still feel you’d like your checklists to be more customized for each of your projects, you may try the Recurring Checklists and Report add-on for your repetitive tasks automation. It’ll allow you to create customized checklists for your issues which will become full-fledged guides for your team members and receive one-page reports. 

This is how you create your checklist in the Recurring Checklists and Report add-on.

Step 1. Create custom checklist

• Add the first checklist 
• Name it
• Add a structured to-do list
• Mention users for every separate step, if you need it

Step 2. Set recurring

• Select the project and issue type where a task with a checklist will be created
• Choose checklist assignee(s)
• Set recurring criteria

After you save the setting, the system will create the issues with a prepared checklist according to the schedule.

Step 3. Monitor progress with a one-page report

As you see, it’s a very fast and simple way to automate your workflow that will take just a few minutes to free you up from repetitive task creation. And as all your checklist assignments are on a one-page detailed report, you’ll have everything under control, monitoring the checklist execution process.

Recurring Checklists and Report is a unique tool that helps managers to control recurring tasks and influence team productivity. Try it out and see what actual effect it will have on your team and workflow productivity, delegation, organization, motivation, and creativity!