Personal time. These Routines are vital for health and well-being and are often nonnegotiable, so they get scheduled first. When do you have lunch? What hour would you like to be home? When would you like to go to sleep, and when would you like to wake up? When would you like to have time with your spouse or your children or your friends? When do y

Order, or sequence, is the only way we really execute: what comes first, what comes next, and so on. And since we can rarely do more than one thing at a time, it’s not helpful to have so many tasks in our field of vision. Instead of making an ever-expanding list of hundreds of tasks (and working furiously and often futilely to check them all off),

Here’s an exercise for habitual overplanners. We’re going to find your Meeze Point: the optimal number of Actions you can put on your daily list before you begin to overload yourself, an Action being either an appointment or a task. This will become your normal daily work threshold. Begun as a 1-day-per-week exercise, finding your Meeze Point can e

What chefs attempt to avoid are orphaned tasks—things that take up physical and mental space because they haven’t been tied up in the easiest possible form to be resumed later. And

Cleaning as you go, not waiting to clean, separated true chefs and cooks from everyone else.

“Yes, Chef!” Ronald replies. “That’s a good answer,” LiPuma says. But LiPuma is having a problem with all the “Yes, Chef!” he’s getting. When he calls out a quantity of something, he wants them to tell him what they heard: Two fish! One pork!

Your checklist should reflect only the factors you can control. A checklist measures your actions, not that of others. A checklist measures meticulous execution, not perfection. The items on your checklist should: Be actionable Measure quantity or quality Fit on one page

How do you know if a task needs immersive or process time? In principle, any task that requires you to be “hands-on” is immersive; any task that you can briefly start or maintain and then be “hands-off” is process. In practice, however, the difference may not be so easy to discern. How brief is that “briefly” I mention above? For me, it usually tak

Alternate blocks of process and immersive work throughout your day. The more management responsibilities you have, the more process time you need in your day.