Cognitive load is what matters

This is why I make lists. Of everything. Checklists for technical processes (work and personal). Checklists for travel. Little "how to" docs on pretty much everything I do that I'm sure I won't remember past a week.

It completely removes the stress of doing things repeatedly. I recently had to do something I hadn't done in 2 years. Yep, the checklist/doc on it was 95% correct, but it was no problem fixing the 5%.

In like Apple Notes or what do you store the checklists in?

I am kind of a bit lazy person at times. But when I need to absolutely not to forget anything that can become messy, a checklist is difficult to beat and as you say, it removes all the stress: you elaborate it and when the time comes, keep applying it or applying all at once.

It works very well for me.

Temporal cognitive load reduction A.K.A. "thanks, past self!"

Depending on the task the most effective way I found sometimes is a hand-written paper stuck on a wall.

Why so? It is always in front of you, it reminds you what you need to do and does not get out of sight, which helps keep the focus.

When you bury it or set it somewhere else it is very easy to bury it.

I use Apple Reminders

Txt files are hard to beat

I like the digital note-taking tools, Evernote and Onenote - actually, used to use Evernote, but it started slowing down after my notebooks became too large, so switched to Onenote.

And eventhough Onenote is MS product and Evernote was the original that OneNote copied off of, OneNote is a better engineered piece of software (I have tons of notes and a few of them very large documents), and Onenote rarely has problems.

Yeah, my OneNote notebook is huge now, littered with checklists, processes, and just notes on different subjects. It's like a secondary memory for me at this point, like longterm storage for rarely used but important info.

The right way to do it is to have one person (preferably you) go over the checklist, while someone else (typically a son) do the actual thing.

I don’t think there’s a correct answer here. Whatever floats your boat. Do you want to scribble things by hand into a physical notebook? Great! Want to use Notepad on Windows for .txt? Or create a .docx using Word?

Don’t follow trends and seek the “next best way to hack your productivity”. Most of those things are snake oil and a waste of time. Just use whatever you have available and build a process yourself. That’s what most people have done that are successful in applying this. They just use the tool they are comfortable with, and don’t over engineer for the sake of it

Same. Like what to take in my luggage. Grocery list. To do list. And everything else. I use Dynalist. Great tool. My secret super power, by those who also made Obsidian.

+1 for lists. I used to procrastinate and suffer every year to do my taxes. Always submit last minute (stress) or late (stress + penalties), but ever since I created a checklist for all the steps (data extractions, data transform in Excel, data loading into tax software, etc.) the tax season is no longer this bad. It still takes me a day, but no stress... just grind though the checkboxes!