The 30-second leaving-home checklist
Most leaving-home checklists die within a week. Not because you lack discipline — because they were built like packing lists: long, ordered by anxiety, and parked in a notes app you have to remember to open. A leaving checklist has exactly one job: get you out the door certain, in roughly the time it takes to put on your shoes.
Five items. That's the budget.
List what you actually spiral about — not everything you could check. For most people that's the stove, the straighteners or iron, the keys-wallet-phone cluster, maybe a window, and the front-door lock. If a thing has never woken you up at 11pm, it doesn't earn a slot. Every extra item makes the whole list more skippable, and the mornings you'd skip it are precisely the mornings you need it.
Order it by your walk, not by your worry
Don't rank items by how scary they are. Order them along the physical path you walk to the door — kitchen, hallway, entryway — so each room hands you the next check. The environment does the remembering; you just move through it. A concrete example:
- Stove off — burners and oven in one glance.
- Straighteners unplugged — touch the plug, don't just look at it.
- Launch pad grab — keys, wallet, phone live in one bowl by the door.
- Window shut — only the one you actually open.
- Door locked — the last item, done with your hand still on the key.
Two details in that list do heavy lifting. The launch pad — one fixed bowl or hook by the door — turns three searches into one grab: you never check for keys, you check the bowl. And "touch the plug" matters because a physical action leaves a stronger trace than a glance; your brain doesn't record automatic looking, but it does record deliberate touching.
End at the door
Always make the lock the final item. The door frame becomes the finish line: hand on key, one last tap, done. That gives the whole routine a hard physical ending — no trailing "wait, did I finish?" — and it anchors the one check people spiral about most to the most memorable moment of the sequence.
How Routina uses this
This is the shape Routina's first routine takes: a short list you drag into walk order, one tap per item as you pass it, a loud confirmation when the last one lands. The whole run is timestamped, so three blocks later the question isn't "did I?" — it's "let me look." Build it once, walk it every day.