Ruhlman asked Keller: What did it take to become great? “Make sure that your station is clean,” Keller said. Ruhlman paused, thrown off by the simplicity of the statement. “And?” “And everything that follows from that,” Keller replied. For Thomas Keller, working clean isn’t just about cleanliness, or order, or minimalism. It is about practicing

Kromelow called the technique knolling. Sachs later codified it as follows: Scan your environment for materials, tools, books, etc., which are not in use. Put away everything not in use. If you aren’t sure, leave it out. Group all “like” objects. Align or square all objects to either the surface they rest on, or the studio itself. Sachs made

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

Inspect and correct happens primarily at a place called the pass, or pass-through, a checkpoint between the kitchen and the dining room. Think of it as the narrowest point in an hourglass, through which all orders from the customers pass through to the cooks, and all dishes pass from the cooks on their way back to the customers. The person who runs

Underplanners surrender to time. Overplanners fight and curse time. What we need is the chef’s mature sense of honesty about what we can and cannot do with time, and of the consequences of surrendering or fighting something that should just be met squarely. What we need is to work clean with time, where working clean with time means two things.

The Zen-like work habits of so-called blue-collar cooks in the best kitchens stand in stark contrast to the wastefulness of the white-collar world of messy desks, endless meetings, bottomless e-mail chains, and general half-assedness that plagues even the best of companies. But is it fair to compare the kitchen to the office?

Mise-en-place transformed Ruhlman’s life outside the kitchen. For a while he ran everywhere, trying to maximize every moment. But what Ruhlman retained from the kitchen was its sense of unrelenting honesty about time and space, success and failure. Good chefs and cooks feared and dreaded failure.

Before you embark on your day, do the following: Check your schedule. Make sure you know your Actions, your moves for the day. Make sure you’ve gathered the resources you need.

Even after trying these alternatives, you may find that 30 minutes is just not enough for the kind of workload you have. If you have the energy and willpower for a regular 45-minute or hour-long planning session, then you might be able to do that. In my experience, however, planning for more than 30 minutes per day gets you into an area where you