Thursday, October 24, 2024
Why Every Live Sound Engineer Should Embrace the Humble Checklist
Sound Design Live: Amidst the chaos and pressure of live event production, who has time for a checklist?
There’s just no room for paperwork, damn it!
Well, buckle up, because I’m about to convince you that checklists are not just for airline pilots and astronauts. They’re the unsung heroes that can transform your shows from “Survived it” to “Nailed it!”
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8 comments:
I love a good checklist. I make them on my phone all the time. I specifically use them for assignments and projects, but I love them in theatre as well. I make equipment set-up and shut-down checklists, and overall pre-show and post-show checklists for myself. I definitely agree with the author that they help clear room in the mind for in-the-moment chaos that inevitably comes up. And, when your mind is in “firefighter mode” as the author puts it, checklists allow you to know exactly what has and hasn’t been done so you don’t end up wasting time trying to figure out what you still need to do. Checklists also help with consistency, for yourself and others. They make sure that you don’t miss things every time, and if someone else has to sub in for any reason, everything they have to do is there, written down, and the show goes much smoother for everyone involved.
This article talks about how checklists can be implemented into sound work in order to benefit your work flow and dampen the possibility for a error in routine checks. What I really like about this is that it takes the stance that checklists should not be controlling to your creativity but help you free brain space to allow you to focus on run and bigger problems. This simple task management tactic would be super helpful for me and my own work. I can be forgetful and missing a routine part of a check wouldu definitely happen to me at some point. Starting to practice checklists will build a good habit for the future for things like sound checks and live events. I also appreciate the application of checklists to other areas and the consideration that checklists benefit everyone involved. The only issue for me is actually creating the checklist and remembering to use it, but once past that hurdle, they will be super helpful.
I’m always a big fan of keeping a checklist of some kind for live performances whether it be for sound or otherwise. The idea of a GitHub repository by the author is a really neat one, and I’m bookmarking the page to go look at later to see different takes on a live sound engineer’s checklist. I always make checklists for board-ops and/or myself when I’m running shows, and they are truly invaluable for the clean run of shows. It’s so easy to forget something in the heat of the moment, and lists really help everyone accountable to completing tasks. Everyone has their own methodologies and I’ve found writing lists with people both enlightening and useful in forging effective collaboration that we can both work with. Checklists are something I want everyone to experiment with because, honestly, they are so useful. This was a great article for resources about lists as well!
I always have a checklist or my notebook to write stuff down with me. There is always so much happening at tech that I’m bound to forget something. Even if you’re not A1, it’s useful to write stuff down as a production manager as well. The production manager needs to remember to ask the A1 to set up that mic. I have countless stray notes on my phones that just say “SL area @ 8’” or “fix cue 23”, etc. I also find that writing everything down helps me plan my time. If my director asks me how long I’ll need before we start, I can quickly look at my notes, see what needs to be done, and give him an estimate. It’s also helpful in situations where you need to allocate tasks to teams of people. Using GitHub is clever, and I might even use it for myself.
Checklists can be an effective way to make sure that people are on the right track especially when multiple people have overlapping responsibilities as we so offer do in theater. I use checklists for almost anything I do, a habit born out of necessity from bad memory and distractibility. I have always enjoyed jobs where checklists are involved, a simple print out will do; bonus points if it is laminated and I have a dry erase marker. Checklists also make sure that when there are multiple people nothing gets overlooked as ‘someone else will surely do that’.
I agree wholeheartedly with the advice and reasoning from this article as good organization and understanding what remains to be done are essential for great management and production related work. To this point, it made me think of how companies and managers can best support these practices amongst their staff to overall improve the quality of the work at their theater, and it seems as though what is required to make this happen is quite simple in that all this requires is putting the minimal resources in people’s hands and encouraging behavior from the top down. Just buying notebooks to physically support these practices, and then engaging and demonstrating the advantages of these practices as a manager to your staff seems like a great start to encouraging better organizational practices and helping your staff produce better work. Finally, I think it is important to demonstrate to people that while at times it is incredibly simple to remember how to complete your checklist, it will almost always make your life simpler to use a checklist, both for that experience and for future habit building with organization.
I also struggle with my memory and having a premade checklist before tech week or even before the show process as a whole starts sounds like a wonderful thing to have. It was cool to learn that people can only really remember 5 to 9 things at a time and I’m glad they shared in the article that a starting checklist should also be about that length. When I try to make check lists I often end up putting more than was necessary or putting small items that were probably too micromanage-y and really didn’t matter, so I liked that they said to keep the lists concise and to the big(or small) show detailing tasks, and I will try my best to follow that on future checklists that I make. The story on hiding small tasks in Van Halen’s technical rider also reminded me of the trick I’ve seen teachers use in syllabi to make sure students have read them, such as giving extra credit for cat photos sent in and it seems that it doesn’t just work on high school students in getting them to read boring documents, but everyone too.
I was a little bit surprised that this article exists – in my mind, checklists are a pretty critical way to get things done and organize yourself and I didn’t think that there would need to be an article arguing the benefits of a checklist. I am a big checklist fan; every week I start a new checklist and I transfer over things from my previous week checklist to my current week checklist, and add new things that are specific to that week. It keeps me on top of weekly assignments as well as deliverables that I have that are not weekly. I also make quick daily to do lists and checklists for things that I want to get done and things that I need to get done. I am aware that I am maybe too much of a checklist user, but it’s wild to me that some people can keep track of their lives without a checklist or a well-updated GCal. Specifically for a single day, especially a day like a load in or a build or a strike, having a checklist feels pretty critical to me because there are many things that need to happen throughout the day that will make you sad if you don’t do. Hooray for checklists!
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