The New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third. In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds. An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.

Master both major and minor tasks—by going back to the basics and writing out a simple checklist. It will change your life. The checklist is one of the world’s oldest—and most effective—productivity systems. If anything, says entrepreneur Alexandra Franzen, it is just as valuable now as it was during the days of the Roman Empire, allowing us to tangibly plan our day and set in stone what we want to accomplish. There are countless apps and organizational systems promising to help us straighten out our lives, but often they only add to the madness and leave us feeling drained and overwhelmed. Learn how to: · Choose your highest priorities · Set realistic goals · Celebrate tiny wins · Feel calmer every day By physically writing down our tasks on a single piece of paper, we force ourselves to be realistic and limit how much we can do in a day. Too often, we cram our day with tasks and chores and leave almost no space for self-care or time with loved ones. We end up disappointed in our inability to complete our never-ending to-do list. Checklists help you accomplish what needs to be done—and enjoy things you want to be doing, too. “There are thousands of books on how to become more organized and productive, but very few have the heart, soul, humor, and gentle encouragement of this book.” —Ellen Fondiler, career and business strategist

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

The U.S. healthcare system is now spending many millions of dollars to improve "patient safety" and "inter-professional practice." Nevertheless, an estimated 100,000 patients still succumb to preventable medical errors or infections every year. How can health care providers reduce the terrible financial and human toll of medical errors and injuries that harm rather than heal? Beyond the Checklist argues that lives could be saved and patient care enhanced by adapting the relevant lessons of aviation safety and teamwork. In response to a series of human-error caused crashes, the airline industry developed the system of job training and information sharing known as Crew Resource Management (CRM). Under the new industry-wide system of CRM, pilots, flight attendants, and ground crews now communicate and cooperate in ways that have greatly reduced the hazards of commercial air travel. The coauthors of this book sought out the aviation professionals who made this transformation possible. Beyond the Checklist gives us an inside look at CRM training and shows how airline staff interaction that once suffered from the same dysfunction that too often undermines real teamwork in health care today has dramatically improved. Drawing on the experience of doctors, nurses, medical educators, and administrators, this book demonstrates how CRM can be adapted, more widely and effectively, to health care delivery. The authors provide case studies of three institutions that have successfully incorporated CRM-like principles into the fabric of their clinical culture by embracing practices that promote common patient safety knowledge and skills.They infuse this study with their own diverse experience and collaborative spirit: Patrick Mendenhall is a commercial airline pilot who teaches CRM; Suzanne Gordon is a nationally known health care journalist, training consultant, and speaker on issues related to nursing; and Bonnie Blair O'Connor is an ethnographer and medical educator who has spent more than two decades observing medical training and teamwork from the inside.

"A godsend for concerned friends and relatives trying to rein in the chaos."-The New York Times Whether you're addressing the rising chaos of a pandemic or preparing for a scheduled surgery, having checklists prepared to guide you through a hospital visit can often mean the difference between comfort and pain, personal and distant care--and even life or death. In today's hospital system, you can face a series of perplexing obstacles to satisfactory care, from overworked healthcare providers to understaffed facilities--which are heightened in times of crisis. You need to know how to take charge of your own healthcare; Elizabeth Bailey shows you how to do just that with a series of essential, easy-to-use checklists to better manage, monitor, and participate in your own healthcare, including: Before You Go, What to Bring, Master Medication List, Discharge Plan, and more. It is more important than ever to have a protocol, including a detailed plan for hygiene and communications while hospitalized. You can trust the medical staff, but you also need to trust yourself or a loved one to be your own best advocate. Newly revised and completely up-to-date, The Patient's Checklist shows you how.

The inspiring story of how a leading innovator in patient safety found a simple way to save countless lives. First, do no harm-doctors, nurses and clinicians swear by this code of conduct. Yet in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country, errors are made every single day - avoidable, simple mistakes that often cost lives. Inspired by two medical mistakes that not only ended in unnecessary deaths but hit close to home, Dr. Peter Pronovost made it his personal mission to improve patient safety and make preventable deaths a thing of the past, one hospital at a time. Dr. Pronovost began with simple improvements to a common procedure in the ER and ICU units at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Creating an easy five-step checklist based on the most up-to-date research for his fellow doctors and nurses to follow, he hoped that streamlining the procedure itself could slow the rate of infections patients often died from. But what Dr. Pronovost discovered was that doctors and nurses needed more than a checklist: the day-to-day environment needed to be more patient-driven and staff needed to see scientific results in order to know their efforts were a success. After those changes took effect, the units Dr. Pronovost worked with decreased their rate of infection by 70%. Today, all fifty states are implementing Dr. Pronovost's programs, which have the potential to save more lives than any other medical innovation in the past twenty-five years. But his ideas are just the beginning of the changes being made by doctors and nurses across the country making huge leaps to improve patient care. In Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, Dr. Pronovost shares his own experience, anecdotal stories from his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and other hospitals that have made his approach their own, alongside comprehensive research-showing readers how small changes make a huge difference in patient care. Inspiring and thought provoking, this compelling book shows how one person with a cause really can make a huge difference in our lives.

Based on the Constantin Stanislavki method of acting, THE ACTOR'S CHECKLIST examines Stanislavki's eight principles in an easily understood checklist format. This exciting acting guide also includes insights from other famous acting teachers, including Uta Hagen, Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, Michael Chekov, and Stella Adler. Providing techniques for use in both classroom and production situations, this edition features new chapters on time, place, and history, as well as a new appendix that covers movement and vocal warmups.

What it takes to be a genius: nine essential and contradictory ingredients. What does it take to be a genius? A high score on an IQ test? Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman's IQ was too low for membership in Mensa. Suffering from varying degrees of mental illness? Creativity is often considered a marker of mental health. Be a child prodigy like Mozart, or a later bloomer like Beethoven? Die tragically young, like Keats, or live to a ripe old age like Goethe? In The Genius Checklist, Dean Keith Simonton examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory. Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses that range from Isaac Newton to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. He explains the origin of IQ tests and the art of estimating the IQ of long-dead historical figures (John Stuart Mill: 200; Charles Darwin: 160). He compares IQ scores with achieved eminence as measures of genius, and he draws a distinction between artistic and scientific genius. He rules out birth order as a determining factor (in the James family alone, three geniuses at three different birth-order positions: William James, firs-tborn; Henry James, second born; Alice James, born fifth and last); considers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule; and describes how the “lone” genius gets enmeshed in social networks. Genius, Simonton explains, operates in ways so subtle that they seem contradictory. Genius is born and made, the domain of child prodigies and their elders. Simonton's checklist gives us a new, integrative way to understand geniuses—and perhaps even to nurture your own genius!

Checklist for Change diagnoses the problems in American higher education today and describes principal reforms that must occur in combination in order for it to remain a vital enterprise: a fundamental recasting of federal financial aid; new mechanisms for better channeling the competition among colleges and universities; recasting the undergraduate curriculum; and a stronger, more collective faculty voice in governance that defines not why, but how the enterprise must change.

Today the deadliest conflicts are not between states but rather within them, pitting tyrants against the populations they oppress. Over a century of data shows that civil resistance campaigns-employing strikes, boycotts, mass protests, and many other nonviolent tactics-are the most powerful means for societies to confront authoritarians. The Checklist to End Tyranny is dedicated to enabling dissidents to become more strategic in their thinking and therefore more skillful in their quest to achieve democracy and human rights. This volume is also a unique resource in helping professionals in the foreign policy and democracy promotion communities to understand at a granular level what it takes for pro-democracy activists to end the dictatorships they are living under. The stakes could not be higher. If the world is to have a Fourth Democratic Wave expanding freedom over oppression, then civil resistance campaigns will lead the way.