Last week’s post about todo lists got me thinking about checklists, which are a kind of next step up from basic todo lists. And I can’t think about checklists without the book The Checklist Manifesto coming to mind. If you want to know about the power of checklists, and get some good motivation in addition to use them, this book is worth a read.
In terms of hledger, there are some times when a checklist is useful. For example, when I close out a year of transactions and start my next file, I invariably go to the hledger documentation so that I have the various steps that need to be done.
Another time, which I mentioned recently in this blog, was setting up an Emacs function to:
- call the ledger-mode-clean-buffer function - save the buffer - run the vc-auto-commit function interactively while checking for errors
I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that the above is a checklist, albeit an automated one.
In any case, sometimes checklists are exactly what you need, either for your plain text accounting or something else. And if you need to know more about them, the above book is a good place to start.