Talent is unreliable at 4:45 on a Friday; systems are not. Build the checklist you would actually run in the last two minutes before sending — you have 120 seconds and no more — then fire it at nine real send-day failures and see which ones it stops. Second tab: design a file name and watch a folder sort itself.
Candidate items
Every item shows what it costs you in seconds. None of them shows what it is worth — that is the judgment you are practising. Pick up to ten.
Your checklist, in order
You work top down. When the 120 seconds run out you stop, because the meeting starts — so order is not cosmetic.
Two-minute clock0s
Killer items go first — the failures with the worst consequences, at the top, where attention is highest and the clock has not run out.
Send-day report
Nine documents left your desk this week. Here is what your checklist did.
—
Failures stopped
—
Reached the reader
—
Wasted secs
Not run yet
Choose your items, order them, and press Run nine send-days.
Design the convention
Whatever you choose here is applied to every file in the folder, which is the only honest way to test a naming convention.
Date
Document name
Version marker
Status
Sign-off record
Why bother: a quality system fails at the last step more often than any other — the wrong file gets sent, or nobody can prove which version was approved.
Your file
This is the March 5 draft, the one on your screen right now.
The folder is sorted the way your operating system sorts it: alphabetically, by name.
Will this survive a year?
Three questions an auditor, an attorney or your own successor will ask.