You’ve identified your Missions and selected your Frontburners. You have a whole bunch of stuff to do. When do you do it? Routines are the answer to that question.

We now share a common Work Clean vocabulary. Missions, your menu of big goals Actions, the steps to achieving your Missions, ordered into Frontburners and Backburners Routines, your mise-en-place for time, into which those Actions are scheduled

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

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?

Our chances of success grow when we ask ourselves “What’s finishable?” at the start. We judge the finishable by two parameters: ease and expectation. Ease is time plus energy: How quickly can we finish something, modulated by how much or how little energy we expend in that time? Expectation is deadline plus stakeholders: Who is waiting for our

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.

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.

The first move is always figuring out the first move

“Yes, Chef!” Ronald replies. “That’s a good answer,” LiPuma says. But LiPuma is having a problem with all the “Yes, Chef!” he’s getting. When he calls out a quantity of something, he wants them to tell him what they heard: Two fish! One pork!