A pilot with forty years of experience still goes through a checklist before taking off.
If you keep forgetting obvious things, missing small steps, or relying on panic to get your life together at the last minute, this may interest you.
Even with years of experience, a pilot still has to check the list before the plane leaves the ground.
A sequence of steps that can look almost insulting from the outside, as if someone that experienced should have grown past it by now. But, no. Experience doesn’t remove the need for external systems. The checklist exists because the human mind is a poor place to store important steps under pressure.
We treat the brain as if it were the control tower of everything. As if, once something has entered our mind, it should stay there, organised, available and ready to be retrieved at the exact moment we need it.
That’s a great plot for a sci-fi movie, but…
The mind forgets, it assumes, it rushes, it gets tired, it becomes overconfident. It says to you, “Well, I’ve done this a thousand times, I don’t need to double-check!”, and that is often the precise moment when stupid mistakes happen.
In aviation, a small omission can become a serious problem very quickly. I don’t think I need to give you an example of what this could be. So the pilot doesn’t leave the essentials to mood, memory, instinct, or professional pride.
He checks. He follows the list: Fuel. Instruments. Flaps. Brakes. Doors. Communication. Configuration. Clearances.
Step by step. Proper execution.
People tend to overestimate what the brain can do, but it is fallible. The purpose of a checklist is to protect competence from normal human failure.
In a recent study about the use of checklists in healthcare, they said something very similar: checklists help reduce predictable human errors, like forgetting steps, trusting memory too much, getting overconfident, or missing something under pressure.
Knowing what to do and reliably doing it are not the same thing.
I see this with patients with adhd. Part of the work is often training the use of external resources: calendars, lists, reminders, routines, visual cues, written steps, etc., etc.
The goal is simple: their daily life, tasks and organisation cannot depend only on spontaneous recall, as in, will I remember this later, or will it disappear from my head as soon as something else enters the room?
But the principle is much wider than that. Anyone who relies entirely on their head ends up at the mercy of attention, energy and emotional state.
Like:
A student can know how to submit an assignment and still upload the wrong version.
A freelancer can know how to send an invoice and still forget the payment details.
A nurse can know the medication routine and still need the written chart to avoid mixing up times, doses or patients.
A builder can know the job perfectly and still need to check the measurements before cutting something.
Different situations. Different consequences.
Same problem: knowing the task doesn’t mean your mind will hold every step at the exact moment you need it.
That is ordinary human functioning. And ordinary human functioning has consequences when you pretend it should be flawless.
People often treat systems as something they’ll use later, when they become more disciplined. Or as something they no longer need, because they’re already experienced.
Underneath that, there is usually a belief in mental omnipotence: the brain should be able to hold the plan, remember the steps, regulate the emotions, track the details, resist the distractions, make the decision and execute the whole thing cleanly.
Then people keep relying on the state of their mind that day.
The explanation is less pretty: there is no system outside the mind doing the boring work that the mind should never have been trusted to do alone.
Now you see how a lot of everyday chaos is preventable.
Not all of it. Life will always interfere. People will get on your nerves. Energy will fluctuate. Plans will break.
But you’ll only find chaos if you try to remember everything, hold everything, track everything and decide everything internally, as if the mind were more dependable than it actually is.
At some point, this stops being about a forgotten link, a wrong file, or a missed reminder. It becomes a way of living: waiting until the pressure is high enough to force you into action.
So if you keep missing the same steps, delaying the same decisions, or cleaning up the same avoidable mess, don’t just ask what is wrong with you. Ask where you’re expecting memory to do the job of structure.
Just do what the pilot does: write the checklist. Use it even when it feels obvious, especially then.
Now. If the problem isn’t only that you forget steps, but that your whole organisation depends on what your mind happens to remember, hold, track or rescue at the last minute, this is something I can help you look at in psychological consultation.
We can look at the pattern underneath and build the external supports your life needs, so your functioning stops depending on memory, panic and last-minute rescue.
Sorry, but your brain can’t be your personal assistant. Stop giving it a full-time admin job and then acting shocked when it fucks up the filing.
Love,
Noemi
PD1: For the study on checklists, their origins, benefits, and current use as cognitive aids, check here.
PD2: For the consultation, go here.
