Work Clean (33 page)

What if I've stopped doing my Daily Meeze for a while?
You will likely see the results in your work life. Start again today!

If I work both at home and in an office, should I do two Daily Meezes?
No. You will keep your good habits and behaviors at both workstations, but only one of them will be primary. If you feel you need to give them equal attention, consider doing your Daily Meeze at home on weekends, or alternate between your two workstations every other day.

The Daily Meeze embodies every ingredient of mise-en-place. It's a
planning
ritual. It requires
arranged spaces
and
perfected movements
. It is
cleaning as you go
exemplified. While we execute our session, we must
make first moves, finish actions,
and
slow down to speed up.
The object of the Daily Meeze is organization, and what we are organizing mainly is our communication: keeping
open eyes
for the important things,
calling back
vital correspondence, and
inspecting and correcting
our calendar and Action list, toward the ultimate ideal of
total utilization
of our time and energy.

MORNING:
PROCESS

Our evening was about preparation, and our Daily Meeze was intentional and intense. But that tension of planning now gives way to the release and relaxation of
having planned,
enabling us to wake this morning with a light heart and clear head.

A big part of having a successful day is leaving enough time in the morning to nurture yourself with Personal Routines. Meditate, exercise, make a healthy breakfast, talk with your spouse, play with your child. If your job or career doesn't afford you the luxury of those Routines, then at the very least you can wake 5 minutes earlier to center yourself for the day ahead. Once that day begins, honor your plans by following
process.

You've planned for the probable, but anything is possible. In the moments before we leave home in the morning, we often make mistakes that affect our entire day by forgetting, overlooking, or ignoring things.

Before you embark on your day, do the following:

1.
Check your schedule.
Make sure you know your Actions, your
moves
for the day. Make sure you've gathered the resources you need.

2.
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 give you the confidence to say “no” or “later” to the things that you must push off your schedule. The people to whom you've made commitments will appreciate your forewarning, rather than bear you ill will for not making good on promises to them.

3.
Run checklists.
To minimize error, use checklists. Some of these lists will be mental or mnemonic. For example, I have a word I say before I leave the house—“BUCK,” for Bags, Umbrella, Cap, Keys—because too often I forget those things. On days that I teach class, I run an extended checklist on my computer because I have in the past forgotten too many items on that list
not
to do so. I resist running the list sometimes because it feels too obsessive; but as stupid as I may feel when I do it, I always feel and look good when I come to class prepared.

Part of our planning and our execution is thinking about when and how we want to arrive: hurried, harried, flustered, and late? Or early, calm, prepared, and happy?

We really
do
have control over these feelings. The two biggest levers of control are:

1.
Giving ourselves enough time on our schedules to travel.
Whether flying 3,000 miles or simply walking across the
street, we know how much time to allow ourselves. We just have to
account for it
in our planning.

2.
Honoring the start and end times we've set.
If we know it takes 45 minutes to get where we're going and we leave only 30 minutes to get there, or if we fail to end a previous engagement in time to make our next appointment, we dishonor our plan and the time of those who await us—especially if that next appointment is one we've made with ourselves for, say, an immersive work session.

Is it okay to be late occasionally? Absolutely. Are there good reasons to be late? For sure, just so long as our reasons aren't on balance due to lack of preparation or poor process. The point isn't to
never
be late or spontaneous. The point is to stop the wasted time, energy, and resources that come from
our
carelessness. Life produces enough chaos without us manufacturing more of it.

The first thing you do when you get to your workplace is spend a short block of time—perhaps 30 minutes—on process work. For an office worker, this Process Routine might mean catching up on e-mails, voice mails, and paperwork. For an artist or freelancer who works from home, this might entail starting the dishwasher to make sure that process happens
while
she focuses on her next immersive task; or calling the plumber for a visit because once her work starts, she'll forget to do this. For the plumber, that might mean checking in with dispatch between house calls.

For
any
professional, process time is about
making first moves
—setting processes in motion that can happen while the hands and mind are otherwise engaged.

When process time is done, before moving into the next appointment or task, do a 1- to 5-minute Transition Meeze.

The goal with the Transition Meeze is the deskbound equivalent of
cleaning as you go
. It enforces and reinforces
arranged spaces
and keeps things in their right places. Here's how to do it.

1.
Reset the table.
Put the previous project away. Close and replace open files. Close open applications. Close browser windows. Wipe any debris off your desk. Do
kichiri,
or straighten your desktop, setting all objects in their right places.

2.
Check your schedule.
Before you jump into your next project, relax and check your schedule and Action list. What's coming up? Who's added you to a meeting? Does anything need to be moved around?

3.
Check your e-mails.
Quickly flag all the e-mails that need action. Archive them all. Then go into your Flagged folder and decide which e-mails you can address quickly, in a few seconds or minutes, and execute those.

If you have time left over, do something to release the tension of work. Stand up and stretch. Talk to a friend. Check social media or your favorite Web site. Drink some water. Take some time for this Transition Meeze, but no more than 5 minutes.

A good Transition Meeze will make your Daily Meeze a breeze. For example, if you tend to leave things in clumps and piles for the end of the day, you may find yourself unconsciously dreading or avoiding your daily planning session. But if you work clean in the transitions between your big actions and appointments, your daily planning will feel lighter and be more productive.

We've set aside 2 hours for writing an important report. We've arrived at our workstation on time. We have our resources at the ready. We begin.

Yet just 2 minutes later we find ourselves goofing off online.

We go into our tool kit and begin an intentional break (see
The Fifth Ingredient: Finishing Actions
), logging each break we take in our session. For the first hour, we're having a hard time focusing, so we log “mental” breaks frequently. Occasionally we are interrupted by colleagues, so we log a couple of “work” breaks. But gradually we settle in. We took five breaks in the first hour and only two breaks in the second. As we near the finish, we get antsy to take another break. But we look at the progress we've made on the memo. We make a choice to push through and
finish the action.
We get the work done. We feel good.

AFTERNOON:
PRESENCE

After noon our best-laid plans and carefully followed processes often crumble under the stresses and surprises of the day. But with proper mise-en-place and the awareness that comes from it, even sudden changes in direction are easier and cause less upheaval because we stay present.

In the middle of an immersive project, we've muted our phones and quit our e-mail program to keep ourselves focused. But because we also know that we work in a company where crises often emerge, we've made sure to check e-mail regularly—triggered by an hourly chime we've set for ourselves on our phone—so that we keep
open eyes and ears
for what's happening in our work environment.

At 1:30 p.m., we open our e-mail program to find that an urgent meeting has been called for 3:00 p.m.: The president of the company is asking all department heads to revise their budgets for a 10 percent cut. The meeting not only requires our attendance but our preparation. We know that we'll need at least an hour to prepare and an hour for the meeting, and that means our plans for
finishing this project by 4:00 p.m. are in jeopardy. This calls for some quick thinking and action.

We had about 90 minutes of work left on our immersive project, and we have only 30 minutes until we need to start prepping for the meeting. Since we can't finish our current project in 30 minutes, our next best alternative is to try to find a way to tie our work up so that we can finish it later.

The first step is to find a stopping point.
Do we stop now or try to get as much done as possible?
We can still work on it for 30 minutes. But we decide that it's probably better to start our meeting prep earlier, to
make first moves
now because we can have a cushion of time in case complications arise. So instead we decide to work for only 15 more minutes, just to outline the part of our project we haven't done, so that when we resume, we'll have a quicker ramp-up time to
finish the action.

The second step is to set expectations, to call the person who gave us the deadline. We ask for a 2-hour extension (another cushion) and figure maybe we can stay at work a little later tonight. It turns out, however, that our colleague has been called into the same meeting as we have.
Everyone
is behind. We don't have to stay late. We just have to find some time tomorrow to finish. But instead of immediately resuming our immersive work—that's our instinct, to rush now that the pressure is on—we take 30 seconds to find the time on tomorrow's schedule and block off 90 minutes for our current project.

This new meeting has pushed two
other
Actions off our schedule. And since we know that they are less crucial than the meeting, we can clear our calendar without fear. We will make sure that
tonight, during our Daily Meeze, we reschedule those items.

But because of our new budget meeting, a new opportunity arises to execute an Action, “Get approval on new program.” We can actually take care of that in the new budget we're making. In this way, we practice
balanced movement,
using one motion for multiple moves.

We and our colleagues work furiously to prepare our budgets in time for the meeting. But we're making mistakes—leaving out information, paying less attention to details. We decide to take a breath, literally. We stand up, stretch, and think: What's the most important thing we can be doing to deliver this assignment? Getting the
numbers
right. So we work slower this time, even though the clock is ticking. As we work, we notice something odd: The budget is missing some line items that we saw on a colleague's spreadsheet. We take a few moments to consult with our colleague and realize, to our dismay, we've been working on an
earlier
version of the budget, the wrong version. We'll have to redo our work, quickly. But if we hadn't allowed ourselves extra time for prep, and if we hadn't
slowed down
and used the buddy system to
inspect and correct
our work, we might have missed the mistake altogether and put forth budget numbers that would have shortchanged us.

While we're in the meeting, we are obsessing about the mistake we made:
How did we miss that new budget?

Suddenly we realize that we're spacing out in the meeting. So we jot down a quick note—“Explore budget mistake”—in our notebook and make an effort to be more present: We put our pen down, we turn our body to face the colleague who's speaking, we keep eye contact, we breathe, we listen.

Part of our commitment to excellence is using process to remedy and redeem mistakes. We view error as a chance to get better. In this case we decide to take a few minutes to figure out how we spent nearly an hour working on the wrong budget form. We realize that we
had
that new budget all along. We listed it as an Action in one of our Mission lists, but as a Backburner item that kept getting pushed back. We mention this to a colleague, and he commiserates: “They send too many e-mails. No way we can read them all.”

Years ago we would have agreed. But we have a different view of responsibility now. Other people are reading these things and taking them seriously. We can't say we don't have time. Time to step up. Since Routines are the way we make time for things that we “don't have time” for, we make a commitment to establishing a new one: 30 minutes of reading every Friday before we leave for the weekend, for all the reports and articles and meeting minutes we get sent throughout the week. The new Routine will squeeze even more time from our ability to do immersive work, but because we are managing more people and a bigger budget now, we know that this kind of process work comes with the territory.