Yeah it's always nerve racking for me... I really need to start taking real notes and have a checklist to follow.
That is the classic aerospace way. Normally we just followed tech orders, job guides, and checklists
that we weren't supposed to put any marks in. And since we were always teams of at least 2
on any on-aircraft work, if I skipped a step my team member would be quick to point it out...and
vice versa.
Too many times I spend time wondering if I did everything I was supposed to. I suppose I could make a check mark next to the items on printed out pages of the manual or something....
Whenever we had to add new capability to our Avionics package, sometimes this would entail adding new
wires to the harness, installing new mounts, adding black boxes, etc. Some of these mods would run to
20+ pages worth of individual steps, (including IPIs {In Process Inspections} by QA) that had to be performed
in the proper sequence.
In order to help eliminate that "wondering if I/we did everything we were supposed to" it was legal to print out
a marked "Working Copy" from the Master Copy of the modification instructions, and we could mark that up as
needed to keep track of our progress. We used check marks, initialed/dated. Especially when we were running
2 shifts.
From a distance I'm sure that this seems like overkill, but if QA or the shop supervisor had a question, no deer in
the headlights look for yours truly, for if any questions came up the marked checklist told the entire story of who,
what, when, etc.
****
From personal experience, I find that when working solo a printed out checklist is even
more valuable than when
we used it to synchronize a multi-team aircraft mod. If for no other reason than I can be interrupted, and even if
I don't lose my place, it does give a place for self-doubt to build. And building the checklist to be printed out
is a nice mental dry run of the physical project itself, for by finding/printing out working copies of the relevant FSM
pages, instead of having to stop progress and find the next step in the process and losing momentum, you instead
just proceed smoothly from step to step. It's remarkable how much faster this can be when making progress is
the bulk of the wall clock time per session.
Kind of a divide & conquer. Check mark & my initials by every completed step, plus notes to myself about other
things I discover along the way. Certainly not necessary for the twenty-something Road Trip (or at least that's what
I used to think) ...but now on the far side of life a detailed checklist is where the zen of a complex project originates. :0)
