_posts/2016-04-21-checklistomania-makes-it-easy-to-keep-track-of-relative-tasks.md
---
title: "Checklistomania makes it easy to keep track of relative tasks"
date: 2016-04-21
authors:
- melody
- anthony-garvan
- nicole-fenton
tags:
- tools you can use
- onboarding
excerpt: "We use Checklistomania to help new and existing employees keep track of tasks that need to be completed. It’s open source and in the public domain: fork it, adapt it, use it — and let us know how we can make it better"
description: "We use Checklistomania to help new and existing employees keep track of tasks that need to be completed. It’s open source and in the public domain: fork it, adapt it, use it — and let us know how we can make it better."
image: /assets/blog/checklistomania/tasks.jpg
---
When a new hire joins the federal government, existing employees
complete over 60 tasks to bring them on board — everything from
providing them with a new computer to ensuring that they take mandatory
training courses.
Each of these tasks have deadlines relative to other tasks. For example,
you have to sign into your work email before you can set up two-factor
authentication or view your first paycheck. Keeping track of these tasks
and how they relate to each other is difficult and time consuming.
Enter [Checklistomania](https://github.com/18F/checklistomania). We
developed the tool at 18F specifically for onboarding. It’s used by new
employees and teams who onboard them, and it has several unique
features:
- Each checklist shows the items that a person must complete, in order of urgency, as well as tasks they already completed. This is particularly useful in government, because we need to complete quite a few training sessions and pieces of paperwork.
- The checklists are centrally defined, so any member of an organization can subscribe to the authoritative checklist.
- Deadlines can be set according to a fixed date or relative to completion of other items. For example, if Task B must be completed three days after Task A (but only after Task A has been completed), the due date will shift accordingly.
- We can view each other’s checklists, which makes it easy to see everyone's status at a glance.
[Checklistomania](https://github.com/18F/checklistomania) is an open
source project in the public domain and may be adapted by any
organization. We’ve found it particularly useful for new employees; they
find it helpful to know exactly what’s expected of them over their first
few days of work. It also reduces the number of questions that they ask
so the onboarding team can focus on other material. The checklists do
not have to be limited to onboarding activities. They’re useful for any
repetitive list of tasks that must be completed by multiple people.
If you’d like to request additional features or work on Checklistomania,
please [file or look at existing
issues](https://github.com/18F/checklistomania/issues).