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Write each row as a state rather than a task — "has a laptop, an account and a first ticket" rather than "IT setup". States can be checked; tasks can be marked done without being true.
An onboarding plan split into HR, IT and manager tracks, with each task carrying an owner and a date relative to the start date rather than a vague pre-start bucket.
Anything with a lead time — equipment, accounts, access — sits at the point it has to start, not at the point it is needed.
Work backwards from the start date. Fill in your own lead times: if laptops take ten days, that task starts ten days before, and it is nobody's judgement call on the day.
Give each track to its owner. One person seeing forty tasks will ignore them; three people seeing twelve each will not.
It will not make somebody productive. It removes the administrative failure; the induction itself is people's work.
It also cannot know your access approval routes, which are the tasks most likely to stall.
A field engineer and a finance analyst share about a third of their onboarding. Make role variants rather than one template with optional sections, because optional sections get skipped entirely.
Keep the first-day list short. Ten things that happen beat forty that get ticked in bulk on day three.
Yes — a start date approaching is not an event.
Enough to cover lead times; short enough that each owner reads their list.
Yes, no email required.
Half an hour on your own figures, and an honest answer about the parts Treepie does not improve.