Checklists and workbooks

What a checklist or workbook is

A checklist is one page that lists the things somebody must do, or check, in the order they do them. A workbook is the same idea with spaces to fill in: a planner, a costing sheet, a decision grid, a set of questions with room for the answers. Both are short, both are practical, and both are used while the work is happening rather than read on a sofa.

That is the whole distinction from everything else in this group. A white paper is read once and filed. A guide is read once, if you are lucky, and then forgotten. A checklist gets printed, marked up, pinned to the inside of a cupboard door, and photographed and sent to a colleague. It is also the only format in this pillar that carries your name at the point of use, which is the point at which somebody decides whether to phone you.

When you need one

You need one when there is a job your customers do themselves that has a right order and a few ways to get it wrong. Pre-season maintenance, preparing a site for a contractor, getting documents together before a meeting, checking a delivery, planning a budget. If you find yourself saying “just make sure you have” on the phone, that sentence is a checklist.

It is also the right choice when the money is small. This is the cheapest thing on offer in this group and, per dollar, it is frequently the one that produces the most work. A one-page sheet used forty times a year by a customer beats a sixty-page download opened once, and it costs a fraction as much to make.

You do not need one if the task genuinely has to be explained rather than listed. Instructions with reasoning, screenshots or exceptions belong in a how-to guide or a proper user manual, and a checklist that pretends otherwise gets abandoned halfway down. I will say which of the two you have on the first call.

What goes in it

• The real order. Steps in the sequence somebody actually does them, not the sequence your departments are arranged in. Getting this wrong is the commonest fault and the easiest to spot in testing.
• One line per item. Short enough to scan standing up, specific enough to tick honestly. “Check the filters” fails. “Check both return-air filters and note the date” works.
• The traps. Two or three short notes on where people go wrong, set apart from the steps. This is the part a customer quotes back to you.
• Space to write, where it earns it. Dates, readings, quantities, a signature line. A sheet that gets written on gets kept.
• Your name and one line about you. At the bottom, small. A phone number and what you do. Not a sales paragraph, because the page is doing the selling by being useful.

What you get

The tool itself. Written and structured, in an editable document, usually one or two pages. Workbooks run longer, but rarely past eight.

A printable version and a fillable one. A clean PDF built to print correctly on standard paper, and a version that can be completed on a screen, because half your customers will want each. Spreadsheets where the workbook involves arithmetic.

A set, where it makes sense. Most businesses have four or five of these in them, and they are far cheaper made together than one at a time, because the format and the tone are settled once.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Kelowna firm that installs and services irrigation systems for orchards spends every March answering the same call: the system has been sitting all winter, something is leaking, and the grower wants somebody out tomorrow. Most of those calls turn out to be four things a grower could have checked themselves in twenty minutes.

The firm publishes a two-page spring start-up sheet. Page one is eleven steps in order, with the two that cause most of the damage marked. Page two has spaces for zone pressures, the date of the walk-through and the fault codes, so a grower who does need to call already has the numbers to hand. It prints on two sides, it goes out with every autumn shutdown invoice, and there is a downloadable version on the site with no form in front of it. Growers pin it in the pump shed. Callouts in March drop to the ones that are genuinely faults, the calls that do come in start with a pressure reading instead of a guess, and two neighbouring orchards ask where the sheet came from.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which job, who does it, and what goes wrong when it is done badly. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. One sheet or a set, agreed before anything starts.
3. The walk-through. One recorded conversation with whoever in your business knows the job in detail, usually the person who takes the complaints rather than the person who sells it.
4. Drafting. Three to five working days for a single checklist, ten to fifteen for a workbook or a set of four.
5. Testing it. You put the draft in front of one real customer or one junior member of staff and watch them use it. Every checklist changes at this step, and the ones that skip it are the ones nobody uses.
6. Delivery. The editable file, the print PDF and the fillable version, with the layout handled or briefed to your designer.

Two to three weeks from first call to a finished sheet is typical, and a set of four takes about the same, because the thinking is shared.

What it costs

Checklists are not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so each is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. This is the least expensive piece of work in this group by a wide margin, and a set of four or five costs meaningfully less per sheet than four ordered separately. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The sheet becomes the most-taken download on the site, because it passes the test the fancier assets fail. The same material gets written up properly as an instructional article for people who want the reasoning. And the internal version becomes a written procedure so your own staff work the same way the sheet tells customers to. None of that is required. A checklist is complete on its own, and it will do its job unchanged for years.