You have a pre-flight sequence, a weekly cleaning rotation, a shift handover procedure, an event setup list. These are tasks that repeat in the same order, every time, without variation. The checklist isn't about remembering what to do — it's about confirming it was done.
Three Fields, One Discipline
Item, Complete, and Notes — the entire template is three fields. The discipline is in what the template forces you not to put there. There's no priority field, no due date, no assignee, no category. For a repetitive checklist — a process that runs the same way every cycle — those fields are noise that adds friction to the confirmation action.
Item is the task. Complete is the binary confirmation. Notes handles the exceptions: the step that was completed but with a deviation, the item that required a substitute procedure, the detail that the next shift needs to know about.
The bulk reset script is the feature that separates this from a static list. At the end of each cycle — each shift, each week, each event — a single trigger resets all items to "Not Complete" for the next run. Without the reset script, the checklist either accumulates completed items that were never cleared, requiring manual unchecking across every item, or the template gets deleted and recreated each cycle, losing the Notes history in the process. The reset preserves the structure while clearing the completion status, which is exactly what a recurring process needs.
The power of a three-field checklist isn't in its complexity. It's in its repeatability. A complex task management system gets used when motivation is high. A simple checklist gets used every time, by everyone, including the new person on their first shift who hasn't been trained on the advanced tool yet.