How We Use Checklists To Boost Our Income, Creativity, And Consistency

Chris Graham (0:29)

It's come to my attention that I'm usually so eager to get into the show that I never ask how you're doing.

Brian Hood (0:34)

I've been taking note of that, and this is the first time you've actually ever done that in your entire life, 40 episodes in. You finally ask how I'm feeling.

Chris Graham (0:43)

But please credit that to my eagerness.

Brian Hood (0:45)

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Graham (0:47)

How are you, Brian?

Brian Hood (0:49)

Man, you know, times are hard. I'm going through a divorce, and I'm just joking, I'm not married.

I love people that spill too much of themselves in situations where it doesn't make sense, and I wanted to be that guy. No, things are great, can't complain at all. I'm really excited for a lot of things that have coming out soon, as you are as well. I'm sure you're excited to get some things launched that you're ready to do.

Chris Graham (1:08)

Very true.

Brian Hood (1:08)

But a lot of what Chris and I do day to day involve checklists, the least of which is this podcast.

And so we're going through our checklists that we go through every time you do this podcast, and we're always revising, always iterating. And the idea came up to do a podcast about checklists.

Chris Graham (1:27)

Now, before you press pause and skip to the next episode that sounds more exciting, I cannot emphasize to you enough how exciting this episode will be and how life-changing it can be, because checklists have staying power.

They can fix a problem for your future, not just like, hey, you had an epiphany, it was cool, then you moved on, and then you keep making the same mistakes. Checklists are incredible. One of my favorite books ever, Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Incredible, absolutely mind-blowing.

Brian Hood (1:59)

This is something that's crucial to our podcast because if we forget one thing, we could ruin an entire episode. Case in point being, as we were talking through potential ideas for this episode, we had another thing that popped up to add to this episode checklist. So we're talking through all the things that studios need to be aware of when it comes to their sessions and making sure things run smoothly and all this stuff.

And Chris brings up the conversation of hard drive space.

And hard drive space is obviously an important thing for audio engineers, but then I realized that in the past, I remember running out of hard drive space during a conversation I had. We had an interview, actually, and Pro Tools deleted the entire take of audio because I ran out of hard drive space.

Now, that's terrifying. That is terrifying to lose an entire episode of audio, but thankfully, I had a backup source going. All that to say, we added to our checklist, check hard drive space, to make sure we have more than enough hard drive space to get to the episode. And so just something like that, one small thing could ruin the entire take, and that's what we're trying to bring to your mind, to your workflow, to your business, and your studio. What are those crucial steps that could make or break the session? And not only that, once you create this checklist, once you've created this systemized process that you don't have to think about anymore, what else can you do with that? What's the next step? So we're going to talk about all that today. But Chris, let's talk about why this matters now. Why is this such an important thing?

Chris Graham (3:19)

Well, let's talk about checklists in general, and specifically the book Checklist Manifesto.

Brian Hood (3:25)

We've both read that, we've both enjoyed that.

Chris Graham (3:26)

Yeah, incredible book. One of our favorite guys in the world, Tim Ferriss, who wrote For Our Workweek, it's allegedly one of the books he keeps next to his chair. It's like one of the few books that he keeps in arm's reach at all times.

So the thing that they talk about in that book that's incredible is they talk about pre-flight checklists. You get on an airplane, there's a guy driving the airplane, or a girl driving the airplane. They have to go through a checklist to make sure they get everything right, because if they miss one thing, everybody dies.

Brian Hood (3:58)

Yeah, people can die.

Chris Graham (3:59)

And so the interesting idea in the checklist manifesto is this idea of like, they take it seriously because so many people can die, but there are so many other occasions when a checklist could really, really save a lot of pain and suffering. An example he uses is pre-surgery. Up until recently, there was no such thing as a pre-surgery checklist.