Authors: Dan Charnas
Underplanners surrender to time. Overplanners fight and curse time. What we need is the chef's mature sense of honesty about what we can and cannot do with time, and of the consequences of surrendering or fighting something that should just be met squarely. What we need is to
work clean
with time, where working clean with time means two things.
1.
Determining our daily actions
2.
Ordering those actions in sequence
The pages that follow contain some exercises and habits to help us do just that.
Kitchen folk have an easier time determining and ordering tasks because kitchen work is defined by physical processes. It's easier to know how long it takes a steak to get to medium-well than it is to know how long it takes to create a spreadsheet, write an article, or make a sale. Knowing how long our actions take is harder for us to determine, but that information is valuable. Creating an honesty log will help you understand how much time your regular, recurring tasks actually require.
Let's use a specific example to illustrate how a creative professional might do this exercise. Let's say you're a graphic designer. How long does it usually take you to come up with a logo concept? Sometimes you allow yourself 30 hours spread out over 3 weeks. At other times you can come up with a bunch of ideas in one intense, 4-hour session. You won't develop knowledge about this without
gathering data.
So for your most important categories of tasks, log your times for a month on a piece of paper, a spreadsheet, or a time-tracking app, and see if they average out in a meaningful way. Some more examples: For a teacher, how long does it take you to prep a class? For students, how many hours does it take you to read 50 textbook pages? For executives, how many small tasks, like returning e-mails, can you complete in an hour, on average? For insurance agents, how long does it usually take you to fill out paperwork on a new client?
Perhaps you will always have certain tasks that are particularly hard to nail down. But what you
can
do, even in those cases, is determine what the length of a “minimum session” might be. Maybe it's not worth working on a logo concept if you can't set aside at least an hour. Great. An hour becomes your baseline for that particular task. And knowing that a logo design might take up to 30 hours, it's your job to gauge and moderate other projects you accept so that you can deliver the one on hand. I know, for example, that for certain types of writing, I can usually get 500 words down in 2 hours. That's helpful information for scheduling purposes, but that information would never have been possible if I hadn't purposefully tracked it.
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 ease you out of the overplanning habit. Fridays are good days to reserve for this experiment because they are often the day wherein we feel the least pressure to over-plan. To begin:
1.
Select a maximum of three Actions to complete for this day. An Action can be as large as something that takes 5 hours or as small as 5 minutes. We want a nice balance of large to small actions, like a normal day.
2.
Place those Actions on your calendar at the appropriate times.
3.
Do not plan or schedule any other tasks for the day. You may do extra, unplanned tasks, of course, as long as you honor your schedule.
4.
Honor your schedule. Show up for your appointments and tasks. If a real crisis arises and you can't honor your schedule, it may be best to do this exercise another day.
5.
At the end of the day, log how many of your three tasks you accomplished.
6.
If you completed all three, then the next week, on your designated day, select and schedule
four
Actions. If you didn't complete all three, stay at three next week.
7.
Continue each week until you arrive at a number of Actions where you become unable to cross all the items off the list for 3 weeks in a row. For example, if you sometimes can get through a nine-item list, but can't
ever
get through a 10-item list, then your Meeze Point is 9.
8.
Once you arrive at your Meeze Point, you can then begin to bring other days into this regimen, using your Meeze Point as a guide for your maximum number of Actions to schedule for your days.
From this practice, I know my Meeze Point is 10.
The home kitchen is a great place to practice the principles of mise-en-place before you apply them to your work life. The next time you make an ambitious recipe in the kitchen, make a timeline similar to the one they do at the CIA. This is how you do it.
1.
In the first column, write down all the ingredients listed. Determine what you don't have on hand and circle those items.
2.
In the second column, transcribe the circled items into a shopping list.
3.
In the third column, write the steps to the recipe.
4.
In the fourth column, the actual timeline, write the start times for each of those steps.
5.
In the fifth column, write the list of tools (pots, pans, spatulas, etc.) that you'll need for all those steps, and also the tools you'll need for service (plates, silverware, napkins, glasses).
6.
As an extra step, you can make a diagram of what item goes on which burner, for example, or where you'll be setting up your cutting board.
You'll begin to notice that there's a world of things that many recipes don't tell you: What to buy. What tasks to do while other tasks are in progress. What tools to use. How to coordinate your cooking with your service.
Being honest with time is another difference between the
professional and amateur cook, but practicing that honesty in the kitchen can engender honesty in the planning you do at your desk or computer.
For chefs, a commitment to a daily practice of planning comes with their jobs. For us, the commitment to planning will have to come from within. The most important way to work clean is to keep dedicated, structured planning time. If you were to take only one recommendation from this book, creating a Daily Meeze is the paramount habit.
What is a Daily Meeze?
It is a personal mise-en-place for your workday, a time to (a) clean your physical and virtual spaces, (b) clear your mind, and (c) plot your day.
How much time does it take?
30 minutes.
When should I do it?
In kitchens since the time of the tenzo, tomorrow begins today. Many chefs begin tomorrow's planning in the evening, at the end of their current workday. Some like to do their planning in the morning because new and important considerations often appear at the start of a workday. It all depends on the kind of chef
you
are.
The Daily Meeze is so central to the practice of working clean that we've dedicated an entire section to showing you how to do it. See
A Day of Working Clean
.
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 need your time and your presence. This difference has long been maintained by the two different tools we use for each: the “to-do” list and the calendar.
But for the chef, as it should be for us, it is a false difference. The “to-do” list without appointments lures us into packing lots of tasks onto it without thinking about when they will actually get done; and a calendar with only appointments on it misleads us into thinking we have an open schedule when in fact we don't. This separation creates an unhelpful tension between our mental and spiritual goals (which usually end up on our list) and our physical presence (which is usually determined by our schedule).
The main reason we order and schedule Actionsâtasks and appointments alikeâis that we want to give ourselves the best shot at getting them done.
“A to-do list is useful as a collection tool,” writes author Peter Bregman. “Our calendars, on the other hand, make the perfect tool to guide our daily accomplishments. Because our calendars are finite; there are only a certain number of hours in a day.”
We schedule our Actions to help us make decisions about themâand as a device to force our hand. The calendar compels us to be honest about time. A list, too, can be a serviceable device for ordering your dayâas long as your appointments are on it! This is the way that chefs think about time. We should, too.
Plan complex, multistep projects as chefs do: with the end in mind. Just as some chefs begin a dish by drawing a plate, for your own projects, first envision the moment of delivery, then plan backward from it. What resources will you need to make it look, read, feel, or sound perfect? What time will you need? Have you accounted for possible delays, holidays, disruptions? Have you given yourself time to inspect and correct? What other things will you have to give up in order to deliver?
Where is “there”? Everywhere. How early? Fifteen minutes. Why? The dividends are serenity and opportunity. Entering a space calmly, under your own control, and without apology retains your power and dignity. So many of us hustle and stumble our way into a room after an agreed-upon time. When we do that, we forfeit a chunk of our energy before we even sit down.
Arriving early often unlocks opportunity. An old friend of mine recently had this epiphany. He had always been a “late person” until recently when he made a commitment to arrive at a weekly class before the designated start time. “I realized that there were all these other people showing up early, too,” he said. He liked “early people.” He made connections, he made friends.
Getting there early applies especially to the appointments you make with yourself because those are the appointments you are least likely to keepâhaving no one to answer to but yourself. Prepare early, make sure to disentangle yourself from whatever it is you happen to be doing beforehand, and you will ensure that you'll show up for yourself. Some of the most successful chefs and executives I know share this ethos and practice.
Entering a space calmly, under your own control, and without apology retains your power and dignity.
In 1999 Chef Dwayne LiPuma became a high priest of mise-en-place when he began teaching at the CIA.
LiPuma had mastered the painstaking planning that allowed him to open up his breath, greet every workday, and cook with love. But he had also discovered the limits of mise-en-place at home. He found that he had to temper his planning impulses at home or he'd drive his wife and his daughter Kaitlyn crazy. Once he realized that mise-en-place had its own right place, he valued and understood it even more. He began to see how his entire work practice of mise-en-place could allow him to relax, greet the evening and weekends, and let go of structure. A happy home was his reward for having compressed his work with mise-en-place. From this, he learned several things: Mise-en-place is not about focus, but rather the process of negotiating focus and chaos. Mise-en-place is an inside jobâmeaning that it's something you have to choose, to willingly take on. And mise-en-place is also a shared culture, meaning that while he could have his own mise-en-place in his home, that mise-en-place ended where his wife and kids began, unless he and his family agreed where they shared it.
His wife, Kareen, began laying her clothes out at night, too. And she found Dwayne's planning instincts handy, like when she organized a $300-a-plate fund-raising dinner in a fancy Park Avenue apartment. LiPuma loved to plan, and catering was the greatest planning challenge. If you forget an ingredient in a kitchen, you can always walk to the pantry; if you forget a pot, you can go to the storeroom. In catering, if you don't bring it, you won't have it.
On one piece of paper, he wrote his menu. On another, his ingredients and tools. On still another, he ordered that information into a schedule. After a day of planning and shopping, he assembled the tools and ingredients into a neat row of brown shopping bags, each divided and labeled by menu item: soup, pasta, foie gras, scallops, and so on.
Kareen walked by 2 days' worth of planning and said: “
Man,
you are anal retentive.”
“No,” LiPuma said. “This is how chefs think.” He was going to cook in someone's home, after all.
When the big evening came, LiPuma found it almost too easy. Kareen and his daughter Kaitlyn became his sous-chefs, but he hardly needed them. They enjoyed a nice, relaxed service, and it turned out to be a great meal. LiPuma had little to do but be present, joke, and smile.
Kareen smiled back.
My hero.
The Italian without a stallion, riding the range. Just a different kind of range than he had planned.
Recipe for Success
Commit to being honest with time. Plan daily.
In a kitchen at the New York Institute of Technology's Long Island campus, a chef taught his new students how to turn potatoesâ“turning” being one of the basic techniques of knife work: peeling and cutting vegetables so that they have a smooth and uniform shape.