The Checklist Doesn’t Solve It
My blog post ideas usually hit me on the head when I’m struggling. Today’s struggle was getting my kids out the door to school.
This seems straightforward in theory. I even made a checklist, taped to the fridge:
Wake up, 7:30 am. Get dressed. Eat breakfast. Dishes in the dishwasher. Brush hair. Brush teeth. Lunch in your bag. Water bottle in your bag. Coat on. Shoes on, 8:30 am.
Twenty minutes, easy. I got up at 6 am today. By 8:30, we were nowhere close to ready, and I found myself wondering if my neighbours were about to call the police over what sounded like a domestic disturbance in my kitchen.
Nothing was wrong with the list. My kids are good at following lists. Something else was missing.
It reminded me of my work with clients, which starts the same way: a template. A spending plan, property, debts, all filled in over what should be a couple of hours. Both the checklist and the template look concrete and achievable on paper. Both take longer than they should, and both come with more angst than the task itself would suggest.
Because the real work was never the checklist or the template. The real work with my kids was figuring out what was actually going on underneath, the reason two siblings kept finding new and creative ways to torment each other. That meant talking to their dad, coordinating with grandparents whose old discipline methods weren’t landing the same way with these kids, and doing the relational work instead of hoping a fridge list would fix it. That work is slow and uncomfortable, and it’s the part I tend to avoid.
The spending plan template works the same way. Filling it in takes two or three hours, tops. That part really is easy. But the ease is only on the surface, the same way the checklist looked easy until it didn’t hold.
When I did this work with clients, I’d ask what was actually going on underneath, whatever was likely to stretch a simple two-hour process into something much longer, and I’d encourage them to deal with that first. Not because the spreadsheet mattered less, but because reviewing a spending plan is quick. It’s only worth doing once the angst underneath it has somewhere to go.
I used to tell clients: this will take three hours if I’m working in a total vacuum the moment I get your information. But nobody works in a vacuum. It could take three hours, or a while longer. We’d figure it out as we went, and I’d keep them posted as best I could.
