The most common mistake in homemade checklists is treating the list as the procedure. It isn't. The procedure is your flow: the practiced, eyes-across-the-panel sweep you do from memory. The checklist is what you read afterward to confirm the flow caught everything.
Build a checklist as a do-list and every item becomes a step you perform by reading. That's slow, head-down, and brittle. The day you're busy or rattled is the day you skip a line and never notice.
Build the flow, then write the check
- Fly (or chair-fly) the phase and notice the natural order your hands and eyes already move in.
- Write the checklist in that order. It should feel like confirming, not discovering.
- Each line is a thing you verify is already set, phrased as item plus state: "Fuel selector, FULLEST TANK".
Read-and-do has its place: emergencies, unfamiliar procedures, anything you can't safely do from memory. But your normal-ops checklists should be do-then-verify, and short enough that you'll actually read them.