Santa may have the world's most famous list, but he doesn't share it with the rest of us. Take a look around and you'll see lists almost everywhere: a restaurant's menu, the airport's big marquee showing flight arrivals and departures and David Letterman's Top 10. Most people make gift lists for Christmas, shopping lists for trips to the grocer, and even enemies lists, though that term fell out of favor after the Nixon administration.

Read a previous article from Louie Castoria: “Fire the client? Sometimes it's worth it.”

Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author, thinks that we all should be making more lists and checking off the items as we complete them. In his recently published book, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” Gawande proposes that the simple act of making a list and using it could prevent countless mistakes, or as we insurance types call them, “errors and omissions.” He points to the World Health Organization's Surgical Safety Checklist, a list of 19 items that can be answered Yes, No or N/A. In the initial study using the list, inpatient deaths following major surgeries were reduced by 40 percent just by following the checklist, according to the New England Journal of Medicine (Jan. 29, 2009). So naturally, all major hospitals worldwide immediately adopted the checklist as their standard procedures by the end of 2009. Well, perhaps “naturally” they should have, but in fact only about 10 percent of American hospitals had done so a year after the study was published.