August 18, 2022

The first thing that struck me when I read Dan Charnas’ book Work Clean in 2021 was that the practices it described were how I had been approaching life, for as long as I can remember.

The second thought I had was, “wait—this isn’t what everyone else’s brains are always doing?”

https://twitter.com/geecyr/status/1419446634866376707?s=20&t=o7cqJF-5N8nL1fBSvytx4g

Mise-en-place is a French culinary term which roughly translates to “putting in place”. Work Clean describes “mise-en-placing your life” as learning how to live and work with economy of time, space, motion, and thought.

For as far back as I can remember, my brain has visualized the way I move through the day as a dance between interconnected frames; each frame containing moments/activities. I am almost always picturing a few frames ahead of where I currently am and considering how the current frame will link to the next frame and the next, and how I can make those connections as seamless and effortless as possible. In Work Clean, they call this task chaining.

There are three central values of mise-en-place:

1. Preparation: always thinking ahead; preparing all the time in small and large ways.
2. Process: considering how to do something better or easier or with less waste.
3. Presence: mindful awareness of what you are doing.

The way mise-en-place show up in my life is probably most obvious in how I move through my home or approach running errands.

1. The sequence in which I execute things and how I chain them together is very top of mind for me:

• I consider how I move through my home a choreographed dance whose goal is to make my movement as efficient as possible; if I have to go downstairs for some reason I am always thinking “is there something I can take down and return to its rightful place, is there anything I can do on my way down there, is there anything I can bring back upstairs after?”.
• When I’m running errands I will carefully think through and then map out in my calendar the sequence in which I’m going to make my various stops; when I’m in a store (that I know fairly well) I sequence how I will pick up everything I need to conserve movement.

2. Marking is my magic, i.e. setting visual reminders of what needs to be done:

• The dishes waiting near the bottom of the stairs so they get from the basement up to the kitchen.
• The library books near the door so I remember to return them.
• The stamped letter on my desk so I remember to mail it.
• And so. much. more. all. day. everyday. Without marking, I would be lost.

3. I am honest with my time, always considering how much time an activity will take and how much I can reasonably accomplish in a set period of time.