New customer checklist

Cut delivery work first

Most over-long lists are onboarding plus the first week of delivery. Anything that is the work you were hired to do belongs in the engagement plan, not the onboarding checklist, and moving it out typically removes a third of the rows without losing anything. The test is simple: would you still do this line if the customer had been with you a year?

Then cut requests you cannot justify

Go through the documents you ask for and, for each one, name what you would do differently if it were missing. Anything with no answer is a request inherited from a template or a former colleague. Each one you remove takes out a chase, a follow-up and a possible stall, which the worksheet on this site will price in your own minutes.

Keep everything that is a promise

Confirmations, dates, named contacts and anything you told the customer would happen stay, however small. These are the lines whose absence produces the specific failure where the customer believes work has started and your team believes it is still waiting, which costs far more than the minute the line takes.

Know when you have cut too far

You have gone too far when the same thing gets missed twice and the fix is a line you deleted. That is evidence, and it is the only reason to put a line back. Restoring lines on the strength of one bad week is how a short list becomes a long one again within a quarter.