Why I am a Big Fan of Checklists for College Coaches

by Mandy Green, Busy Coach

I am a big fan of using checklists as a college coach.  

The human mind doesn’t perform well when given difficult but repetitive tasks.

Think of the cockpit of an airplane or a nurse in the ICU. 

We tend to miss critical steps which end with errors, omissions and other problems. 

The depth and breadth of what we know has exceeded our ability to deliver effectively on the knowledge correctly, safely or reliably.

A checklist is the solution.

When nurses in the ICU created a checklist for what should be done… the average stay in the ICU dropped by more than half.

And no doubt you wouldn’t want to fly in a plane with a pilot that didn’t go through his / her pre flight checklist. 

A checklist at the grocery store can save you thousands, stop impulse purchases, save extra trips which doubles up your impulse buying…

Here are my experiences with checklists.

1. Checklists bring order to a chaotic mind
2. Checklists will save you from failure
3. Checklists will provide you a higher standard of baseline performance (CRITICAL)
4. Checklists allow you to seamlessly delegate a task to somebody else. 
5. Checklists will dramatically reduce your anxiety as well as help you sleep
6. Checklists are your helper. If it doesn’t help… the checklist is not correct

What checklists have you created for your recruiting processes and for all of the operational work to ensure your coaching and program thrives?

If you’re like the masses, you do not have a single checklist in your entire life right now.

Time to change that?

I’ll give you one example.  I used to use “The Hotel Guy” to book my hotels.  He is free, saved me a ton of time, and was super easy to work with.  

I noticed at first that we used to send multiple emails back and forth.  I created a checklist to ensure I gave him everything he needed on the first email so I could avoid multiple back and forth conversations. 

Here is a short clip of the process I created.  

Setting up our Fall Hotels

The Hotel Guy
Mark L. Rosoff, CHSP
Telephone: 919.417.3494
Web Site: http://thehotelguy.org/
Email: markthehotelguy@gmail.com 

Email him our fall game schedule so he can see where we are playing. 

He will need to know:

1. The date and estimated time we will be arriving 
2. The date we will be leaving
3. How many rooms we will need
   1. 1 room for head coach-1 king
   2. 1 room for male assistant coach-2 queen beds
   3. 1 room for female trainer-2 queen beds
   4. 1 room for bus driver-king
   5. 2 players per room-queen beds
4. How much we can spend on each room-$90-130.
5. We always want to try to reserve a conference room to have meetings
6. We always want a deluxe hot continental breakfast bar / free wifi & bus parking

This one checklist helped to speed up the hotel booking process, it eliminated a lot of mistakes, and freed up my time to focus on bigger and better things to build my program.  

Start creating checklists today.  It is a game changer.

If you want to see a good majority of the checklists that I had created and used as a coach, for check out my Busy Coach Template and Checklist Pack.  There are over 80 different processes that I had created to help me work more efficiently and effectively.