Process tasks don’t necessarily demand immediate action, but by their nature, they should be done or delegated in the short term. Immersive tasks can be delayed, but if left unscheduled for too long, they become blocks to your work and career.

Begin each day with 30 minutes of scheduled process time—starting, unlocking, and unblocking the work of others.

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

The backlog of work can easily overcome line cooks, so they’ve trained their minds to do two crucial things: queue all incoming orders and then focus only on the next step for each dish currently on their burners. The beauty of mise-en-place is the ability it engenders in chefs and cooks to fight chaos and tune out distraction.

On his way to work, LiPuma saw commuters dashing for the subway—flustered, sweating, stumbling—and the next day he’d see those same commuters rushing again. After working in the kitchen, LiPuma couldn’t understand what was wrong with these people. Why not get up a half-hour earlier? Wasn’t greeting your day better than fighting it?

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.

Precisely because the kitchen operates under intense time pressure with perishable resources, it has developed a more refined philosophy of organization. That system abhors waste in all its forms and has evolved distinctive ways of rooting it out.

Each of these Actions we do for a reason. The Mission is the reason. Your Missions are the things you want to accomplish in life and in work. Every Mission has within it a number of Actions or steps needed to accomplish that Mission. Missions give those Actions meaning, and most crucially, order. Missions are, in effect, top-level Actions. They are

Without learning how to work, and work clean—meaning to do that work with economy of time, space, motion, and thought—they can’t cook professionally.