Keeping a Checklist Short Enough to Actually Finish
Every pre session routine starts short and gets longer. Nobody plans this. Each addition is individually justified, usually by something that went wrong recently, and no single line looks like the one that broke the list. Then a morning arrives where the bell is four minutes away, six items remain, and the routine gets skipped entirely rather than partially. That is the failure worth designing against, because it takes the useful items down with the useless ones.
Growth Is the Default Direction
Adding a line feels like learning. Something was missed, the fix is obvious, and writing it down converts an unpleasant experience into a small improvement. Removing a line feels like the opposite. It feels careless, and it invites the thought that the very next session will be the one where the removed item mattered.
The asymmetry is the whole problem. A process where additions are easy and removals are uncomfortable has exactly one long term outcome regardless of how sensible each individual decision was. Unless removal is scheduled deliberately, it does not happen.
What Earns a Place
A useful item has three properties. It has a yes or no answer, so completing it does not require thinking. It can be answered in well under a minute. And its answer has, at least sometimes, changed what happened next.
That third property is the one that quietly disqualifies most lines. An item that has returned the same answer every session for six months is not protecting you, it is costing you time and attention on the mornings when time and attention are scarce. It may still belong somewhere, but somewhere is a weekly review, not the ten minutes before an open.
Some Checks Belong Earlier
A good deal of what accumulates on a pre session list is not a check at all. Reviewing recent sessions, calculating typical range height, updating a spreadsheet, reading through anything: these are preparation, they take real time, and they are being done at the open only because that is when the trader happens to be at the desk.
Moving them to the previous evening usually halves the morning routine at no cost. The test is whether the item could have been completed twelve hours earlier with the same result. If it could, it does not belong in the window where minutes are expensive.
Cutting Without Losing the Reason
Deletion is easier when the item is not actually destroyed. Keeping a separate list of retired checks, with a note of why each was added and why it was pulled, removes most of the discomfort. Nothing is lost, the reasoning survives, and if the same failure recurs the item can come back with its history attached.
This also stops the same line being reinvented every few months. A routine that has cycled the same forgotten item in and out three times is telling you something about the item, and the retired list is where that pattern becomes visible.
Judging the Length
There is no correct number, but there is a reliable test. Run the list under the worst realistic conditions rather than the normal ones: a late arrival, a distracted morning, an unfamiliar instrument. If it finishes under those conditions it will finish under any of them. If it only finishes when the morning goes well, it is too long, and it will fail on precisely the days it was written for.
The other honest signal is whether you are still completing it. A routine that is being skimmed rather than worked through has already failed, and skimming is difficult to notice from the inside because the list still gets marked as done. Watching for that is worth more than any amount of care taken over the wording of individual lines.