Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work and Mind

Schedule process time in regular, shorter intervals throughout your day, at “stopping points” between meeting time, immersive time, and personal time. If 30 minutes of process time at the beginning of your workday will set or keep processes in motion and loosen the pressure on you, put it before ostensibly more “important” tasks.

Each of these Actions we do for a reason. The Mission is the reason. Your Missions are the things you want to accomplish in life and in work. Every Mission has within it a number of Actions or steps needed to accomplish that Mission. Missions give those Actions meaning, and most crucially, order. Missions are, in effect, top-level Actions. They are

After clearing your station, your Action inbox will be filled with uncategorized items. Here’s what you do next: Assign each incoming Action item to a Mission. After that’s done . . . Adjust the order of each Mission to display the proper Frontburner at the top. Order the next several Backburners. Often a new Action will become the Frontburner, bum

For the processes that they haven’t internalized, they use an outboard memory device called a checklist. Chefs know that success is doing a job right once and then repeating it.

Experienced students unpack nested tasks and break them down into their component actions. Then they put them in sequence.

Step Two. For each of those tasks, list one action you can take to decrease that resistance. Some suggestions: For difficult physical tasks, look for ways to arrange your space to make the motion easier. For example: If reaching the file cabinet is a problem, try positioning your desk another way or purchasing moveable file boxes or bins to get you

On his way to work, LiPuma saw commuters dashing for the subway—flustered, sweating, stumbling—and the next day he’d see those same commuters rushing again. After working in the kitchen, LiPuma couldn’t understand what was wrong with these people. Why not get up a half-hour earlier? Wasn’t greeting your day better than fighting it?

Our chances of success grow when we ask ourselves “What’s finishable?” at the start. We judge the finishable by two parameters: ease and expectation. Ease is time plus energy: How quickly can we finish something, modulated by how much or how little energy we expend in that time? Expectation is deadline plus stakeholders: Who is waiting for our prod

We arrange spaces—and perfect movements within those spaces—to remove resistance. The less friction we have in our work, the easier it is to do, the more we can do, and the quicker we can do it; and thus the more physical and mental energies we can preserve for other things.

Should we extend our Daily Meeze if we can’t get everything done? I think that 30 minutes of planning per day on average is enough to handle a working person’s busy life. Less than 30 minutes of planning wouldn’t be a serious enough commitment. Beyond 30 minutes begins to feel out of balance with our other needs and duties and causes a lot of stres