On checklists

David Allen says he has loads of checklists and he uses them every day. I have one or two myself. So how could MonkeyGTD manage checklists? Daniel and I were just having this discussion and I thought I would share our conclusions.

Idea 1 - Checklists are snippets you can paste into the quick entry box.
Suppose you have a party checklist. Create a tiddler called "Party Checklist". (Tag it as "Checklist" to make it easy to find later). Enter some actions in .action name format, ie the format used by the "Process Inbox" quick entry box. Here's an example:

.Decide on guestlist|Home
.Send invites|Email|F
.Buy beer|Errand
.Buy snacks|Errand
.Setup stereo|Home|F

Now suppose you are having a party you can go to the quick entry box and type:

Party Feb 17|Friends

then find your checklist tiddler and copy and paste the contents underneath the above. Click create these items to create. Now your checklist is converted into a project with actions. The next time you have a party you can do it the same way perhaps refining the checklist each time you notice something extra is required. The problems with this is that because each tiddler must be uniquely named you could only have one party at a time, ie you would have to delete the old party actions to create a new one. Also I think that in many cases you want your checklist to be more lightweight that a full-blown project with actions. This leads to...

Idea 2 - Checklists are just text you can paste into body of an action (or project)
This time create a tiddler called "Travel Checklist". (Again tag as checklist so you can find it later). In there enter the following:

* Passport
* Tickets
* Sunglasses
* Money
* Credit cards
* Towel
* Ear plugs
* Phone
* Phone charger
* etc...

Now when you are actually travelling you can create an action "Pack for trip". Edit it and copy and paste in the above into the body of the tiddler (aka notes). Better yet just use the include a tiddler macro like this:

<<tiddler "Travel Checklist">>

This will include the contents of your checklist in the notes. Now Daniel points out that this way you won't have the satisfaction of clicking a little checkbox for each item on your list. I replied that you could print it and use a pen. Or you could just do it mentally. (I think this example is a list that your brain could processes easily enough).

(I also suggested to Daniel that if he installed Eric's CheckboxPlugin from http://www.tiddlytools.com/ he could probably have a lightweight checklist with those satifying checkboxes). So anyway I think both of these ideas have merit and are probably useful depending on the situation. I think my own use of checklists is more likely to be lightweight like the one in idea 2. What about you?