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

Remember, a Routine is not an Action, but a time bucket for Actions, in the same way that a plate is not a meal. But the way you arrange your table determines what you can fit on it.

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.

Process tasks don’t necessarily demand immediate action, but by their nature, they should be done or delegated in the short term. Immersive tasks can be delayed, but if left unscheduled for too long, they become blocks to your work and career.

Every Mission requires a recipe to see it through. As in kitchens, recipes are lists of Actions that, in most cases, will happen in a particular sequence and often have sub-Actions. The difference between chefs and the rest of us is that chefs spend a lot more time thinking about that sequence.

In the Work Clean system, the Frontburner is the first Action needed to move forward on a Mission. All the following Actions are Backburners.

We now share a common Work Clean vocabulary. Missions, your menu of big goals Actions, the steps to achieving your Missions, ordered into Frontburners and Backburners Routines, your mise-en-place for time, into which those Actions are scheduled

What’s interesting about the mise-en-place form is that it’s no simple “to-do” list. “Steps,” the breakdown of tasks, takes up only a quarter of the page. Another two sections ask the student to list resources, “Equipment” on the left and “Foodstuffs” or ingredients on the right. But the most prominent of the four areas of the form is the daily “Ti

starts with the CIA timeline, a paper form that chefs expect students to use every day and master. In preparation for each class, students must list their needed tools, ingredients, and tasks for the day. They must arrange those tasks in time, plotting precisely when each thing is supposed to happen. When students find themselves running behind in

I call “hands-on” time immersive time, because the projects that happen in it are wholly executed by me and happen largely independent of external processes and other people. The vegetables won’t chop themselves. Hands-on, immersive time aligns with creative work—activity with which we engage fully. I call “hands-off” time process time, because the