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

Precisely because the office doesn’t have to manage the efficiencies of a kitchen, the people who work in an office aren’t obliged to have any philosophy or system at all. Even in the best corporate environments, tolerance for waste—waste of time, space, talent, personal energy, and resources—is much higher than in kitchen culture.

We should always be unblocking stuck projects so we can finish them. For every major goal, project, or mission, we should ask the question: What’s stopping me from moving forward? What has stopped the process?

Instructors invoke mise-en-place when they tell students to keep their cutting boards and workstations clean and when they tell them to arrange their tools in a certain order and return them to that order after they use them;

Check your vital inputs (like e-mail or your workplace’s messaging software). Has anything come up overnight that might necessitate a change in plans? Some days you may find that you need to rearrange your schedule. That’s fine! Your careful planning has not gone to waste. Quite the contrary, your planning should lessen the anxiety of change and gi

Better to not open too many projects at a time so that I keep orphaned tasks to a minimum and give myself a fighting chance at finishing them.

Try this thought exercise for 1 day’s work, marking each task on your daily list with one of the four categories listed in the delivery matrix above, and then choosing which actions to deliver based on what yields the best combination of practical and political benefit.

In Work Clean, all tasks and appointments are Actions, and we include all Actions on our schedules and lists.

The Backburners are the following tasks for each Mission, the ones to which you’ll be pivoting after the Frontburners are finished. When you accomplish any Frontburner, the Backburner behind it slides up immediately to take its place as Frontburner, and so on, until that Mission is accomplished. The first one or two Backburners remain in your perip

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.