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Confluence checklists: why you need them for recurring tasks

5. December 2024
by Christopher Dunford
Confluence isn’t great for recurring tasks, and it's because it doesn’t have checklists! Let’s dig in to this gap in the toolset and what you can do to fill it.
Confluence checklists: why you need them for recurring tasks

Confluence isn’t great for recurring tasks. Whether you’re documenting daily IT checks, compliance and financial audits, or your customer success process, you’re probably looking for a Confluence checklist to standardize the work. And you’re probably peeved that there aren’t any. Sure, there’s a workaround, but it’s unwieldy and not really fit for purpose.

So let’s dig in to this strange and annoying gap in the toolset and what you can do to fill it.

Why you might need a Confluence checklist

A Confluence checklist can entrench and standardize routines that involve the same steps over and over. They also provide clarity to the person doing the work, and make them accountable for anything on the list that isn’t done.

For example, if you use Confluence for IT documentation and process management, you’d want checklists for things like responding to IT incidents, onboarding new employees, and installing software products. It’s also likely that every morning someone in the IT team has to complete a series of system checks and fill out a checklist as they go. A checklist that needs to include yes/no questions and text fields, so that users can detail when and why a system is down.

Here’s another example: using Confluence to create customer success playbooks. In this case, Confluence checklists would be helpful for detailing all the steps required for customer onboarding, ongoing communication, contract renewals, and upselling.

Whatever your use case, a key requirement is reusability. You need a new system check checklist per day, a new customer success checklist per customer. Therefore, you need a way to create a Confluence checklist template, which allows the same checklist to be generated on a Confluence page on a recurring basis.

Is it possible to create a Confluence checklist template out of the box?

Mmmm, sort-of. You can’t make a Confluence checklist template per se, but you can create a checklist using a Confluence macro called “action item” and incorporate it into a Confluence page template. Then, whenever you generate a page based on the page template, the same action item checklist would appear.

Screenshot of Confluence template with action item checklist

Of course, so would the rest of the content on that page. What if you only want the checklist?

Let’s say you create a “meeting preparation” checklist using the action item macro and stick it in a “weekly update meeting” template. You might also want the same checklist for a campaign kick-off meeting or a meeting with a customer, and you don’t want the rest of the content on the “weekly update meeting” page template because none of it is relevant.

Your only option would be to copy and paste the list of action items into a new Confluence page or page template. Urgh.

By the same token, you might have a marketing team planning a campaign, a product team planning a release, or an events team planning a corporate away day—and they all need to use the same budgeting checklist on completely different Confluence pages. The page template + action item macro solution just wouldn’t work.

Now let’s say you have a Confluence page template with one or more checklists and you create a page based on that template, but you later want to add more checklists to the page. Since the page is already created, the only way to do this is by copy/pasting an action item list from elsewhere or typing a new one out manually.

This workaround doesn’t offer much in the way of tracking and reporting either. You can bring up a list of all action items that have and have not been completed using the task report macro, but it’s hard to configure and that’s the only info you get. What you want are statistics for tracking multiple completions of the same checklist over time for quality management. And Confluence doesn’t offer this.

Are there Confluence checklist macros available on the Atlassian Marketplace?

At the time of writing, there’s only one Atlassian Marketplace app that lets you create Confluence checklist templates: Didit for Confluence. Let’s look at how Didit compares to the native workaround.

Checklists in Confluence (and beyond)

With Didit, you can create new checklists and checklists based on templates right there in your Confluence page, using the Didit for Confluence macro.

These checklists can be turned into templates, or you can create and manage checklist templates in the Didit hub.

Screenshot of Confluence page with Didit checklist

But unlike the action item macro, your checklists live independently of your Confluence pages, which makes them inherently more flexible. You can add the same checklist to different pages and add new checklists to pages you’ve created with page templates.

You can even provide access to checklists via public link, QR code, or mobile app, so users who don’t have a Confluence license can still complete your checklists. This extends the potential applications of Didit checklists beyond Confluence to include routines and repeatable workflows that non-desk workers have to do, e.g. an on-site IT technician dealing with an incident, or a facilities manager performing building maintenance.

Yes/no questions

Another limitation of the action item macro is that you can’t offer yes/no questions. If your checklist is for an inspection, you likely want lots of yes/no questions so you can confirm whether jobs have been done and standards have been met. There’s no other Confluence macro you can use to achieve this either, but with Didit, you can change any checklist item to a yes/no question.

Screenshot of yes-no feature in Didit

Enhanced checklist accountability

Didit has features that enhance accountability for recurring work. If you use the yes/no question feature, you can toggle on a “mandatory explanation” so that when a user clicks no, they’re required to qualify their answer. And if they want to, they can add an image to provide further context.

Screenshot of mandatory explanation feature in Didit

You can also require that users add their signature to a checklist once completed, to verify that everything has been done.

Recurring Confluence checklists

If your recurring work happens on a fixed schedule, you can configure Didit to automatically generate a checklist based on a template at your chosen frequency. This could be daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or biannually. It means that if you have IT system checks that have to happen every morning, a technician can arrive to find the checklist ready to go.

Screenshot of Confluence recurring checklists feature in Didit

Tracking and reporting on your Confluence checklists

Didit offers statistics about your checklists and checklist templates, e.g. number of completions and average completion time.

You can also export multiple checklists as a single PDF report, using filters to ensure that you’re capturing the exact insights you need. A multi-checklist report can answer a range of questions. What’s still left to do? Was there a problem completing something? Why weren’t these checklists signed?

Screenshot of checklist template statistics in Didit

Sync with Jira

If your Jira teams need to use some of the same checklists as your Confluence teams, then you can install the functionally identical Didit for Jira app and make your checklists available across both products. Any changes made to checklists and templates will sync between them.

Our documentation offers step-by-step guidance on how to create a checklist or checklist template in a Confluence page or the Didit hub, as well as how to use all the above mentioned features.

To summarize (TL;DR)

  • A Confluence checklist is useful if you have to do recurring work in Confluence such as compiling monthly reports or documenting daily processes. They help bring clarity, consistency, and accountability to your corporate routines.

  • A key requirement for all Confluence checklist use cases is reusability; in other words; you need to be able to make checklists based on templates rather than write them out from scratch each time (which is against the point of having a checklist).

  • There is no way of making a Confluence checklist template natively, but there is a workaround using page templates and a Confluence macro called “action item”. If you include an action item list in a page template, you technically have a ready-made checklist when you create a page based on that template.

  • The native workaround isn’t very flexible as these checklists are tied to page templates and can’t be used independently on different pages. Reporting on action items is limited.

  • There is only one app on the Atlassian Marketplace that lets you create a reusable Confluence checklist template, and that’s Didit for Confluence.

  • With Didit, you can build checklists and checklist templates both inside and outside of Confluence pages. You can add images and yes/no questions, require signatures, set up recurring checklists, report on checklist activity, and share checklists with non-Confluence users. You can also install Didit for Jira and make the same checklists and templates available to both Jira and Confluence teams.

If you’re looking to create checklists in Confluence or even beyond it, book a personal demo of Didit or trial the app for free on the Atlassian Marketplace.

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