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

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

For the processes that they haven’t internalized, they use an outboard memory device called a checklist. Chefs know that success is doing a job right once and then repeating it.

Chefs commit to a life where preparation is central, not an add-on or an afterthought. To become a chef is to accept the fact that you will always have to think ahead, and to be a chef means that thinking and preparation are as integral to the job as cooking. For the chef, cooking comes second. Cooking can’t happen without prep coming first.

First: Empty and Log Physical Inputs

Before we can master the swift, we must master the steady, and to master the steady, we must consciously reduce our speed.

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

Routines are “time buckets” in your schedule, into which you put Actions. They are like the cook’s empty “nine-pans,” a mise-en-place for time. Routines are recurring. You may adjust them week to week, but ideally, your Routines should be just that: routine. Routines can fall into any one of the following categories.

Missions require Actions to be completed. Those Actions require order, so you can know what to do and when to do it—hence the idea of Frontburners and Backburners, what comes first, what comes next. And those Frontburners must actually happen in time; they need scheduling. There are two ways to schedule an Action: (1) as a stand-alone appointment o

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