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

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.

Here’s how it goes: You think the mantra. Your focus gets pulled. You notice after a while that you’re not thinking the mantra anymore. You start thinking the mantra again. The process repeats. You don’t get angry at yourself. You don’t tell yourself and others that it’s not working. You don’t curse your wonderful, restless mind. You just accept th

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.

What’s the first thing I need to do, right now, to get myself closer to the finish line and get this thing out the door? The first move is always figuring out the first move.

Try to break large projects into chunks that are finishable in the time you allot for them. Set benchmarks. For example, I know I can usually write 500 words in 1 to 2 hours.

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.

Being scrupulous with time means more than creating a list. Making a list is only half the job of planning. To complete the other half, the chef must square that list with the clock. How much time will this take? How many things can I do in time given my resources? When, exactly, will I do them, and in what order? Chefs cannot afford to take too ma

The second began in 1859 when a 13-year-old boy named Georges Auguste Escoffier started working in his uncle’s restaurant in Nice. By the time he died at age 88 in 1935, Escoffier had secured the global dominance of French cuisine and elevated the work of the cook to something honorable, if not quite holy.

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

An Action is anything you plan to do during the day. Any task (“Pick up butter,” “Call Jeff,” “Sketch designs for new campaign”) is an Action. An appointment (“Staff meeting,” “Conference call,” “Lunch with Sam”) is also an Action. There is no difference between a task and an appointment when it comes to thinking about scheduling because they both