NetChecklist.com Setting Up Checklists

This video explains how to set up checklists in the NetChecklist.com task management application.

Video Transcript - Setting Up Checklists Within the Task Management Application NetChecklist.com

Hi, welcome to another video tutorial on the web application NetChecklist.com. In this video I'm going to talk about how to setup checklists in the application.

In this application, all of the tasks that are necessary to complete a process can be saved as a checklist. Items on a checklist are not on the task list. A checklist is like a blank form that you can use over and over again by making copies of it. When a checklist is copied, the application adds all of the items that are part of that checklist to the task list. The benefits of this are that your checklists can be continually improved over time and then each time a checklist is used, all of the tasks from it are added to the task list automatically, so nothing gets forgotten and there's no typing required.

Here we're logged in again as my fictitious user Bob Broker and we're working in a fictitious organization called Ready Real Estate that Bob is an administrator of.

If we select the "Checklists" button up here on the main menu, we can see all of the checklists that belong to this organization and if we click one of the checklists to select it, we're taken to the screen where we can edit this checklist. So there's sort of two things we're seeing here. There's checklist itself, you can see the name of it up here at the top of the page and we can click this link to edit the information for the checklist, and then there are the individual tasks that belong to this checklist which we see down here. In this case there are 9 individual tasks that belong to this checklist but a checklist can have any number of tasks. Each of the individual tasks has three links, one to edit it, one to delete it and one to make it dependent on another one of the tasks that belongs to this checklist. Task dependencies are really cool but we'll cover them in another video.

Let's click the link at the top of the page to edit the information for this checklist. Here we see that we can change the name of the checklist, the checklist description, whether or not it's inactive, it's display order and it's default user. The description, display order and default user are all optional. Now, because the name of the checklist has to fit into the menu buttons and drop down menus in many, many places throughout this application, it's length has to be limited, but the checklist description gives you a place where you can enter a longer description of for checklist if you need to do that. The inactive checklist field does exactly what you would expect it to do. Inactive checklists won't show up in any of the drop down menus or things like that. I'll come back to this in a minute.

The display order just controls the order in which the checklists are listed, both here and in other places throughout the application including in the drop down menu items where, you select which checklist you want to make a copy of, for example, so it just allows you to display your checklists in whatever order makes sense to you. It simply puts them in ascending order so it's OK to skip numbers and I like to do that so if I need to insert a new one later, it's easy to put it wherever I want to without having to go through and renumber the entire list. Finally, you can select a default user to assign the tasks on this checklist to. This is also an optional field and you may end up not even using it. I'll explain more about that it's for another video.

The last thing I want to point out on this page is down at the bottom where you may or may not see a button where you can delete the entire checklist along with all of the items that belong to it. We saw the same thing regarding whether or not you can delete a project in video on managing projects and this works the same way. Basically, if any copies of this checklist exist in the database, then you won't be able to delete it. If you can't delete a checklist because copies of it exist in the database and you don't plan on using it any more then just make it inactive - that's why that option exists. Finally, just like I talked about at the end of the projects video, if you can't delete a checklist because copies of it exist in the database, what I don't recommend you doing is editing the checklist to create a new checklist because that will be very misleading if you ever referred back to any of the old copies of that checklist that you had already made. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and re-watch then end of the video on managing projects.

Finally, whenever you make changes to anything on this page, you need to click the "Make Changes to Checklist" button down here at the bottom of the page to save your changes. Let's cancel out of this page and move on.

Let's cancel out of editing this checklist by again clicking the "Checklists" menu item at the top of the screen and now let's look a little more closely at the list of our checklists that belong to this organization over here on the right side of the screen. First notice that there's a setting asking whether or not to display inactive checklists and it's currently set to "No". Let's change it to "Yes" and click the button to "Update Display Inactive Checklists" and now we see that there actually is another checklist that belongs to our organization that is inactive. Even though this inactive checklist is now showing up here, it still won't show up in the drop down menus in other parts of the application but we can now get to it to edit it and to reactivate it if we want to.

Also on this list of checklists that belong to this organization we can hover over one, and when we do, notice that a text box appears that displays some information about this checklist. What it's showing us is actually that display order, followed by the checklist description, if there is one and finally a note that says click to edit this checklist. This is where you can see the display order and checklist description on any page that displays this list of checklists without having to actually come to this page to edit the checklist.

If we want to create an entirely new checklist we can do that in two ways. We can either go up to the main menu and click the down arrow button adjacent to the "Checklists" button and then select the menu item that says "Create New Checklist" or several of these pages having to do with checklists will display a button in the right sidebar to "Create a New Checklist". Either way, we get a form to create a new checklist that has pretty much the same fields that we saw when we were editing the checklist so I won't waste time going over them again.

Let's go back to the main checklist page by clicking this "Checklists" button on the main menu. If we want to add a new item to one of the checklists, we can again go up to the main menu and click the down arrow adjacent to the "Checklists" button and this time scroll down and select the item labeled "Add New Item to Checklist". Again, several of the pages having to do with checklists, including this one will display a button in the sidebar to "Add a New Item to a Checklist" and again, choosing either of these options will take us to the same page so let's do that now.

Once we're on the "Add New Checklist Item" page, the first thing we have to do is select which checklist we want to add this item to. If you wanted to add this item to a new checklist, you would need to create the new checklist first so that you could select it from this box. If you accidentally add an item to the wrong checklist, it's super easy to fix. All you would have to do is go to the checklist where you mistakenly added the item, and find that item item, and edit it and change the checklist that it's assigned to to the correct checklist and save the change and you're good to go.

Now, I wanted you to see that first but before we go through the rest of this form, I want to go back for a second and show you one other thing about the button that got us here so let's again go back to the main "Checklists" page. Notice that this button says "Add a New Item to A Checklist" "A Checklist" and if we click it, the first thing we have to select is the name of the checklist that we want to add the item to. If however, we already have a specific checklist selected, let's select on now, so we're on the page for a specific checklist, notice that that item is slightly different. It now says "Add an Item to This Checklist" and if we click it, we're still taken to the same page to add an item to a checklist but now the checklist name, the one we were already working on, is already selected for us. The idea is that if you're already working on a specific checklist and you want to add an item to a checklist then that's probably the one that you want to add the item to, but if it isn't you can always just select a different one when you get to the page.

So, moving on down this page, we next enter the actual task we're adding to a checklist - what it is that someone is actually supposed to do.

Notice for a second that all of this is 100% customizable. You can enter whatever you want for the checklist name as well as for each item on a checklists so I know I've mentioned before that this is a completely generic application but seeing how you can set up your own checklists as well as the individual items that belong to each checklist should make it even more obvious now that you really can use this application for literally anything you want to use it for. The application just provides the functionality.

Next, we can choose the user this task will be assigned to each time the checklist it's a part of is copied to the task list. You can select a member of your organization to assign this item to and if you do then this item will be assigned to that user every time this checklist is copied. If you need a little more flexibility, however, the ability to assign some or all of the tasks on a checklist to a different member of your organization each time you make a copy of the checklist, you can set the "User Assigned" on those tasks to "Assign User When Copying Checklist" and then each time you make a copy of that checklist, you can choose which member of your organization you want to assign those tasks to. I'll explain more about that in the video on copying checklists.

Next, we can make this task inactive which means that it won't be copied to the task list when the checklist is used. You could use this for something you're thinking about adding to a checklist or something you're thinking about deleting but you aren't totally sure and you don't want to add or delete it quite yet. You can also make it an "Urgent" item which will mark the task as "Urgent" each time it's copied to the task list.

Next is the task description which can contain a large amount of text so that you can describe in as much detail as necessary how or even why this task should be completed. This can be very useful for training new employees where you can include a detailed description of exactly what needs to be done in order to properly complete this task, how it needs to be done and possibly even an explanation of why completing this task is important to the organization.

You can select a "Task Class" which I'll cover in another video but you do have to create your task classes first before you'll have something to select something here. Task Classes basically just give you another way to sort and filter your tasks once they're on your checklist. Task classes can help you work more efficiently by focusing on one type of tasks at a time. You can also enter at "Task Time" for this task which is the amount of time in minutes that it should normally take to complete this task. I'll go more into how that can be used in another video.

Next, you can enter a number of "Delay Days" for this task which will usually be zero. This just provides a way to deliberately delay when a task will be assigned to whoever it's assigned to. It could be used for example when a salesperson needs to follow up with a prospect a week or so after their initial contact. In a case like that, the point is to wait a week before contacting that person again so you could enter the number 7 here for 7 delay days. If it's set to zero, then the task will be assigned immediately when the checklist is copied so let's set this one to zero and I'll do a separate video going into more detail on the delay days feature.

The last field to fill in when adding a new task to a checklist is the "Display Order". Just like the checklists have the display order that controls the order in which they show up over here, and the individual items that belong to each checklist also have a display order that controls the order in which they show up in this list so you can make the tasks appear in whatever order that makes sense to you. Again, they're just displayed in ascending order so it's OK to skip numbers and I usually start with 10 and then increment the items in steps of 10 so that I can easily go back and enter tasks wherever in the list I want to without having to completely re-number the entire list.

Again, to save the new item you're adding to a checklist, you need to click the "Add Item to Checklist" button at the bottom of the page.

If we go back and quickly look at version 1 of our checklist, we see that each item shows it's display order and you can see that these are not set in increments of 10 so if I wanted to add a new one at some point in the middle of this list I would have to manually re-number at least some of the items in the list depending on where I wanted to add the new item. Let's go back up to edit the checklist again and scroll to the bottom of that page and there is another link we didn't cover before that says "Renumber Checklist" and if we hover over it, the text box that pops up says "Re-number all of the items in this checklist in increments of 10. They will be kept in the same order they are currently in. Doing this spaces them out so you have room to add new items in between them if necessary." Let's click that and we get a confirmation screen and when we again click "Re-Number Checklist" it tells us that 9 items were re-numbered and now if we look at them we see that the list order for each of the items does now go up in increments of 10.

So that is how you set up checklists in this application. In the next video, we'll learn how to use our checklists by copying them to our task list.