The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


#652： Chefs' Secrets for Organizing Your Life


Episode Stats

Misogynist Sentences

7


Summary

In this episode, we talk to Dan Charnis about his new book, Everything in Its Place: The Power of Mise en Place, about how to organize your life, work, and mind through the concept of "mise en place."


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I'll see you next time.
00:00:30.000 I'll see you next time.
00:01:00.440 We then discuss how to arrange your physical working space for greater efficiency and the importance of working clean.
00:01:05.220 From there, Dan explains what he thinks Stephen Covey's famous idea of putting first things first doesn't take into consideration,
00:01:10.780 and why it's important to understand the difference between what Dan calls process time and immersive time.
00:01:15.020 At the end of our conversation, we discuss the tension between perfection and delivery,
00:01:18.060 the way call and call back communication system used in kitchens creates teamwork and respect,
00:01:21.880 and the fact that the success of any organization system rests on a daily commitment.
00:01:25.300 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash work clean.
00:01:29.040 All right. Dan Charnis, welcome to the show.
00:01:40.760 Thank you.
00:01:41.680 So you got a new book out, Everything in Its Place, The Power of, I'm going to see if I get this right, mise en place.
00:01:47.440 That's right.
00:01:48.000 To organize your life, work, and mind.
00:01:50.520 So mise en place is this concept, we're going to dig deep into it,
00:01:53.080 but it's a concept from the world of cooking, from chefs.
00:01:55.360 How did you make the connection that mise en place, it's a philosophy of work that chefs have.
00:02:01.120 How did you make the connection that, hey, maybe regular people can take something from this to learn how to be more productive and organized?
00:02:06.580 That's a great question.
00:02:07.960 It happened gradually as this sort of new breed of nonfiction started to come out in the late 90s, early 2000s, the chef narrative, right?
00:02:19.180 Not a cookbook written by a chef, but literally stories about the lives of chefs, the personal and professional lives of chefs.
00:02:27.600 So Michael Ruhlman, a journalist from Cleveland, wrote this amazing book about going to the Culinary Institute of America to become a chef called The Making of a Chef.
00:02:40.880 He wrote that in the late 90s, I believe, and that was followed by Anthony Bourdain's famous first nonfiction work, Kitchen Confidential.
00:02:50.940 And central to both of these incredible books was this idea of mise en place, right?
00:02:58.040 This code by which cooks and chefs lived.
00:03:03.740 And what's really interesting is that the lives of chefs and cooks can be pretty crazy, right?
00:03:09.860 You know, we're talking about people who sort of view themselves as pirates, modern day, you know, outlaws and brigands toiling away in these really hot kitchens away from the prying eyes of the public.
00:03:24.060 And yet, in the midst of all of this, you know, revelry and sometimes inappropriate and drunken behavior, there's this eye of the storm that's super, super calm called mise en place, this code of behavior that enables these folks to do enormous amounts of work
00:03:47.040 and create enormous amounts of product and be enormously efficient, all without moving their feet.
00:03:56.420 And so, as I transitioned into some corporate jobs in the early 2000s and started to work in places that were much more stiff and rigid and, you know, corporate than I had ever worked before.
00:04:14.620 You know, I had become a vice president at Warner Brothers in my 20s and, you know, had to learn on the fly doing this kind of stuff.
00:04:22.620 I began to become a little jealous, a little envious of that lifestyle, that idea that we have sort of a shared code, a shared idea of how to be efficient and not wasteful.
00:04:36.500 Because the one thing about working in corporate America is that although there are certainly talk of efficiency and productivity, there's just enormous amounts of waste in corporate America.
00:04:48.760 And so, I began to look for ways myself, just personally, to incorporate some of those ideas into my life.
00:04:58.320 And then, a few years later, well, much later really, after I published my first book, which was a business history of hip-hop, I began to get the idea that maybe there wasn't a book written on mise en place.
00:05:11.340 Maybe I could write that book.
00:05:13.460 That's where this all started.
00:05:14.600 Well, let's talk about mise en place.
00:05:16.500 Is it like a codified system of rules?
00:05:19.860 Is it a philosophy?
00:05:21.000 Is it both?
00:05:21.740 I mean, what are the big picture principles of it?
00:05:24.520 All right.
00:05:24.740 Well, to answer your question, it wasn't codified.
00:05:27.720 And that's one of the reasons that I wrote the book.
00:05:29.940 There were certain ideas that were floating around, but it had never been codified.
00:05:34.800 So, what I did over the course of two years, going in and out of professional kitchens and culinary schools, talking to chefs and cooks, professional organizers, you know, and sort of restaurateurs, I came up with sort of three general principles and 10 ingredients or tools that make up this system of mise en place.
00:05:59.000 So, the principles first, they are preparation, process, and presence.
00:06:06.580 So, what mise en place, which, and let's talk about that term, right, because we haven't, it's a very strange term to us if we don't speak French.
00:06:15.960 Mise en place literally means in French to put in place.
00:06:18.660 If French folks hear this, it just means to get ready, like your state of readiness.
00:06:24.180 What do you need to put in place in order to be successful?
00:06:28.460 For a cook, that means gathering all your ingredients and tools in one place, already prepared, with a sense of organization that allow you to keep cooking, you know, these same dishes over and over and over again without moving your feet.
00:06:45.240 And so, that life of mise en place requires a commitment to planning every day, a commitment to following process, that there are things that work, to not rebel against process, things like checklists, very important.
00:07:01.720 And it's funny, like the people who really take their work seriously, because lives are at stake, whether it's, you know, making sure that food is clean, or making sure that an airplane gets to its destination safely, or that a patient on the operating table makes it off of the operating table, doctors, chefs, airline pilots all work from checklists.
00:07:27.340 They all work with process, they all work with process, they all work with process.
00:07:29.580 They don't rebel from process.
00:07:31.800 And then finally, this idea of being present, you can't phone it in, so to speak, you always have to be aware, situational awareness is really part of the mise en place lifestyle.
00:07:44.360 So those are the three general principles, planning, process and presence.
00:07:50.500 But then I broke it down to like 10 ingredients or strategies, things that cooks use over and over again to, you know, get through their day.
00:08:00.160 The first is making a plan, literally making that, that checklist, and also squaring it with the calendar, which we can talk about it.
00:08:09.560 Arranging their spaces and perfecting their movements is a second one.
00:08:13.500 The third one is cleaning as you go.
00:08:15.300 The fourth and the fifth are making first moves and finishing actions, you know, how to start and how to finish.
00:08:22.320 The sixth one is slowing down to speed up, this kind of counterintuitive way of thinking about how you deal with your emotions when things are really piling up on you.
00:08:33.240 Then the next couple are sort of about communications, open ears and eyes, call and call back,
00:08:39.180 and inspecting and correcting the idea of learning how to edit and be edited, learning how to supervise and to be supervised.
00:08:49.080 And then the final of the 10 ingredients is what chefs call total utilization, which is this idea that nothing be wasted, no resource, no moment, no ingredient, no person be wasted, no space be wasted.
00:09:05.280 Right. That's the, that is the end goal of mise en place.
00:09:10.580 And when you understand what the kitchen business is like, the restaurant business, like you understand like why a chef would have to develop this, this code.
00:09:18.320 Cause you don't have margin to waste.
00:09:20.940 Like you don't have, like there's a tight deadline.
00:09:22.760 You have like that night, you have to get as many meals out as possible.
00:09:25.660 You can't waste any ingredients because any wasted plate that's muddy down the drain or down in the, in the garbage can.
00:09:31.080 And so they have to like, they have to be as efficient as possible.
00:09:35.020 Yeah.
00:09:35.200 That's brilliant.
00:09:35.920 I mean, that's a, it's a great observation.
00:09:37.540 And you, you know, imagine arriving to a restaurant for your six o'clock reservation and the host says, I'm sorry.
00:09:45.820 We're just not ready to open yet.
00:09:47.740 Chef's running a little behind, you know, that might be fine for the doctor's office.
00:09:52.320 And it's fine maybe if we're expecting to launch our 2.0 software on October 1st and it ends up getting pushed back to October 15th, but that doesn't work in the restaurant business.
00:10:04.100 And frankly, that's why this stuff finally only exists in the oral tradition of restaurants, of professional food service, because they're ruled by the clock and we are not.
00:10:19.640 We function more according to the calendar.
00:10:23.080 Things are more sort of movable for us.
00:10:26.280 And as a result, that is where we get lazy and wasteful.
00:10:31.140 And so, and I just have to say, I'm not a professional cook, nor have I ever cooked professionally at all.
00:10:39.540 I approached this entire project simply as a journalist, interviewing essentially more than 100 people over the course of several years to try to figure out what this thing was and how we could take it out of the kitchen into the office.
00:10:55.360 And what's so amazing, dude, is that even chefs didn't think about it this way.
00:11:01.880 Most of the folks that I talked to, I mean, some of the chefs that I talked to had the messiest offices you've ever seen.
00:11:09.260 Like their kitchen is spotless.
00:11:11.220 But you go back to their workspace, you know, and they're, you can't even find their computer keyboard because there's just stuff all on top of it.
00:11:18.640 Right. So there was a leap that hadn't been made that, yeah, there were some things of value that we could take from the professional kitchen and move into the professional office.
00:11:29.700 I think you made this point in the book, what's unique about chefs and the culinary arts, they're actually taught how to work.
00:11:36.500 Office workers, you're never taught like how to be efficient in the office.
00:11:39.880 Like you're taught, you know, sort of some basic rudimentaries, but it's up to you to figure out how to develop system for your work.
00:11:46.200 And I think it's kind of weird when you think about it.
00:11:48.440 It's amazing to me.
00:11:50.340 I mean, but it's also, you know, many of us enter relationships and marriages and there's very little education about how to be successful in a relationship, right?
00:11:59.760 So it's almost like the most basic things about living and survival aren't really taught.
00:12:07.140 It's interesting, though, that two places that this stuff really is taught are the military and the culinary.
00:12:13.400 They have, you know, very much the idea of preparation and process and presence for everything.
00:12:22.500 But no, when I went to journalism school, I was, I mean, I was taught a little bit about how to report, but I certainly wasn't taught how to manage my work, how to manage my day.
00:12:32.460 I didn't know anything about squaring my list with the calendar.
00:12:36.280 And as a result, we have a generation of generations of people running around making lists without understanding that a list is not how you actually get things done.
00:12:47.840 All right. So let's dig into some of these ingredients. Maybe we can change that a bit with this episode.
00:12:52.860 So let's talk about that first ingredient, which is the idea of planning.
00:12:55.640 That's like the first thing that chefs are taught when they go to culinary school.
00:12:59.300 They're given a piece of paper and they're told that you got to make a timeline for the night.
00:13:04.940 So how do they go about planning?
00:13:06.200 So, I mean, again, we got to think about what's the problem the chef's facing here.
00:13:09.280 They have a deadline, a tight deadline.
00:13:11.680 They've got to make lots of different meals for lots of different people and there's going to be setbacks.
00:13:15.800 How do they plan for all that?
00:13:16.980 Well, let's let's think about this backwards, right?
00:13:19.760 Let's think about it from from your perspective and my perspective.
00:13:23.480 At the start of our day, if we're we consider ourselves industrious, we might make ourselves a list, a checklist.
00:13:30.040 You know, sometimes I'll have 10, 15 items of things that I would like to do that day and want to get done.
00:13:38.200 And, you know, maybe I'll get three or four of them done and I'll end up feeling horrible about myself.
00:13:45.500 Oh, my God, how much stuff I have to do.
00:13:47.940 And then that gets pushed to the next day and you make a next and a list for the next day.
00:13:51.600 And there's now 20 things to do.
00:13:53.380 And maybe you get four or five done.
00:13:55.740 That's no way to live.
00:13:57.020 And the reason that we end up that way is that we never do the essential second step of squaring our lists, our checklist with our calendar, because each one of those things takes time.
00:14:11.080 And the time's got to come from somewhere.
00:14:15.040 So I think of it also this way.
00:14:17.640 The list is a function and a product of the mind.
00:14:23.200 But the calendar is a tool that puts our body in a place in time.
00:14:29.260 So squaring your list with a calendar means you're going to take what you think you want to do.
00:14:35.240 And now you have to square it with your body in a place in time.
00:14:39.720 How much time do I need to actually write that email?
00:14:43.160 You might be thinking you can do it in 10 minutes.
00:14:45.140 But realistically, you probably need to give yourself some immersive time to write that very important email that you've been wanting to write.
00:14:51.880 30 minutes.
00:14:52.740 You're going to have to block that out.
00:14:54.220 So I'm a college professor right now, and I teach college freshmen, you know, coming in from high school.
00:15:00.260 And one of the first things that I try to get them to do, and I have to say I'm not always successful, but I try.
00:15:07.160 I say, listen, there's seven or eight hours of coursework, homework that you need to do every week.
00:15:16.300 If you don't block out that time on the calendar, it won't get done.
00:15:20.200 But not doing that is essentially magical thinking.
00:15:24.920 You have to block that time out on your calendar and show up for yourself like you would show up for a job interview or somebody important.
00:15:32.640 That's how we need to relate to squaring our tasks with the calendar.
00:15:37.360 And that's what chefs do every day at the Culinary Institute.
00:15:40.180 They literally have a form where on the left side of the sheet of paper, there's a list of things to do.
00:15:45.800 And on the right side of the sheet of paper is a timeline.
00:15:50.320 How much time do I need to chop those vegetables?
00:15:54.300 How much time do I need for that braise?
00:15:57.340 And what can I be doing while the food is braising to put myself in a position to deliver at precisely six o'clock or whenever service is?
00:16:06.080 So it sounds like if it's not on the calendar, it's not going to happen.
00:16:08.520 That's exactly right.
00:16:10.500 If it ain't on the calendar, chances are it's not getting done.
00:16:14.280 And also squaring your list with the calendar forces you to make choices.
00:16:20.940 And I think we run from choice on a daily basis.
00:16:24.500 Oh, how can I?
00:16:25.500 But I've got to do that today.
00:16:27.340 So you just don't plan.
00:16:29.700 And then your day makes the decision for you.
00:16:33.220 Right?
00:16:33.660 The thing that doesn't get done, you don't control that.
00:16:36.640 The calendar controls that now because you didn't put it down.
00:16:41.540 There are things that I now make sure, because I do this every day, I have to say no to things every day.
00:16:48.380 I have to be realistic about when I can deliver things.
00:16:50.880 But on the other end, that makes me not less reliable but more reliable because I have a sense of when I will be completing things.
00:17:00.060 Now listen, I'm not perfect.
00:17:01.840 I'm not perfect.
00:17:02.220 Nobody's perfect.
00:17:03.600 And there is a lot of wishful thinking that goes on in my life, especially as an author of very long books that have a lot of moving parts and I have to do lots of interviews for.
00:17:12.360 But I will say that my mise en place, my personal mise en place, helps me stay sane amid all of this.
00:17:22.700 I just know that if I rely on my mise en place, everything else will fall into place.
00:17:28.280 And so it sounds like what you can do is just begin your day with a set where you're just going to plan out your day.
00:17:34.120 Or it can be the night before.
00:17:35.820 You have your list, but then you have to make sure everything on your list is on the calendar because that keeps you honest.
00:17:41.560 Well, that is essentially at the core of the one process that I recommend everybody who reads this book do.
00:17:50.640 The book was originally called Work Clean.
00:17:52.300 When it came out in paperback, we changed the title to Everything in Its Place.
00:17:55.560 But the ritual, the daily ritual, is the 30-minute mise, M-E-E-Z-E.
00:18:02.440 And this mise consists of several steps.
00:18:05.940 And the steps are essentially cleaning your tools, right?
00:18:10.220 Making sure that the stuff from the previous day is accounted for.
00:18:13.920 And then really planning your day, squaring your list with the calendar, and then getting your materials together for whatever you need for the day.
00:18:23.700 Preparation, you know, things that you might need, tools that you might need for a meeting, files, things like that.
00:18:30.140 So the book really goes deeply into how that daily mise is done.
00:18:35.520 And you keep it to a tight 30 minutes.
00:18:38.080 That's also important.
00:18:39.500 Because if you're planning more than 30 minutes a day, you're planning wrong.
00:18:43.140 It's not planning.
00:18:44.100 It's actually you're putting work into your planning cycle.
00:18:48.040 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:18:49.740 And now back to the show.
00:18:53.820 Well, another part of the getting prepared for Chef Does is actually like putting things in its place.
00:18:58.780 Like literally mise en place.
00:19:00.640 Like they get an area in the kitchen, and they're never going to leave that spot for the next.
00:19:06.600 And also, they're very meticulous about how they arrange things in front of them so that they're as efficient as possible.
00:19:11.860 Can you kind of walk us through sort of a general what that might look like for a chef?
00:19:14.920 Even for your desk, how many of us, for those of us who have landlines at our desk, you know, where's your phone?
00:19:23.520 Are you crossing your arm over your body to get to that phone and dial?
00:19:27.740 You know, where are the things that you normally grab?
00:19:31.380 If you write with your right hand, are your pens on the left side of the desk?
00:19:37.820 Right?
00:19:38.540 Just little things, just looking.
00:19:40.640 Even your virtual areas on your computer, where are things that you use, where they're easy to use?
00:19:48.340 You want what chefs try to do.
00:19:51.600 And I say chefs and cooks sort of synonymously, right?
00:19:54.900 Chef is just means chief.
00:19:56.400 It's just a leader of cooks, a lead cook.
00:19:59.360 They try to arrange spaces and perfect movements all to reduce friction.
00:20:06.060 And when you reduce friction, you essentially speed things up, make them more efficient, reduce abrasion, right?
00:20:16.980 And you could abrade your mood if you're just constantly doing something that is giving you some sort of distress.
00:20:26.140 I mean, it even could be like, I don't know, an air conditioner or a fan that's blowing on you the entire time.
00:20:32.680 Maybe turn it a little bit so that you have less friction, less bumping up against things.
00:20:38.800 And more of a, you know, one of the chefs that I interviewed, he had this phrase, oil on glass.
00:20:44.900 That's how we want this to be for us, this service.
00:20:47.880 We want our workday to be like oil on glass.
00:20:50.360 That's smooth.
00:20:50.980 So another idea you mentioned earlier, the books was really called work clean, but chefs, that's another part of mise en place.
00:20:57.580 It's like they literally, like not only work clean, not only it means like making sure you set up your work so that you can be frictionless, but it also like they literally, they're cleaning all the time.
00:21:07.240 What's going on?
00:21:07.760 Why do they clean while they work?
00:21:10.200 Well, approach it from the chef's perspective and then from our perspective, right?
00:21:13.820 So the reason that chefs keep clean always and have to keep things, you know, separate in their own little boxes and in the right place always is that if they don't, people can die.
00:21:28.760 Simple as that.
00:21:30.380 The whole restaurant can get shut down.
00:21:32.040 A health inspector comes in there.
00:21:33.260 You can't cut chicken on a cutting board and then not sterilize that cutting board before you cut vegetables on, raw vegetables on it.
00:21:43.800 It's just not happening.
00:21:45.140 So that's why they clean.
00:21:47.860 But another reason is for their mental space.
00:21:51.320 There are great stories from chef narratives about, you know, Michael Ruman in his book, The Making of a Chef,
00:21:58.080 he talks about one of his fellow students who was just really, really falling behind in his ability to get the food out.
00:22:08.060 The term that chefs use is in the weeds, right?
00:22:11.160 Or in French, don't la merde.
00:22:13.280 And the chef instructor came by, that student, and he says, I'm going to show you why you're falling behind.
00:22:19.880 And he put his palm down on the student's cutting board, which was littered with onion skins and meat juices and scraps of vegetables and plastic that was, you know, paper towels.
00:22:33.700 And he picks his palm up and puts it in the student's face with all of that detritus on his palm.
00:22:40.460 And he says, look at this.
00:22:42.500 This is the inside of your brain right now.
00:22:45.880 Work clean, right?
00:22:47.360 Take a moment to breathe and wipe your station down.
00:22:50.880 Literally, wipe your cutting board down.
00:22:53.480 Get things organized.
00:22:55.460 Once you do that, you'll be able to think straight.
00:22:59.020 And I know in our world especially, there's this, I don't know, this sort of countervailing, contrarian notion that, oh, some of the most successful people have messy desks, right?
00:23:11.900 You know, I don't know what they, Albert Einstein.
00:23:13.680 Albert Einstein had a messy desk, you know?
00:23:16.140 Albert Einstein had a messy desk and look how brilliant he was.
00:23:20.160 It didn't affect him.
00:23:21.720 And, you know, my, of course, jocular response to that is, you know, you ain't Einstein.
00:23:27.980 Like, for us, we do need clarity.
00:23:31.720 Clarity helps in our physical spaces so we can have clarity in our mental spaces.
00:23:37.040 And how have you applied this principle to your own work life?
00:23:39.620 Like, how do you clean regularly on your office job?
00:23:42.100 I, it literally, like I said, it's a commitment to process.
00:23:45.720 You commit to doing it.
00:23:47.560 As part of my daily means, I clean my desk.
00:23:50.720 You know, in my own house, we have two desks.
00:23:54.060 My wife has a desk and I have a desk.
00:23:56.540 And whenever I turn around, my wife is sitting at my desk and not her desk.
00:24:03.000 Why do you think that is?
00:24:04.900 It's clean.
00:24:05.580 Because every day I make a commitment to cleaning that space.
00:24:10.780 And when I come back over, sometimes I'm cleaning her stuff on my desk.
00:24:14.880 I love my wife.
00:24:16.020 She's beautiful and brilliant.
00:24:17.940 And she is Einstein in many ways.
00:24:19.820 But, you know what I'm saying?
00:24:23.080 Like, it creates an environment in which you can create.
00:24:30.640 And then you also think about your digital spaces, too.
00:24:33.040 Like, you can regularly clean those out.
00:24:34.520 Like, once a week, I clean up my computer.
00:24:36.760 Like, I go through, delete files I haven't used anymore.
00:24:39.740 I have, like, I do a backup of my hard drive.
00:24:42.120 And that's a process I do once a week to keep that digital space clean for myself.
00:24:46.560 Because that's where you do your best work.
00:24:48.540 And everybody has that one space.
00:24:50.880 And I will say this.
00:24:51.840 Like, no human can possibly maintain an absolutely pristine environment everywhere at all times.
00:25:00.300 That's not what being human is.
00:25:02.540 And that's not what I'm advocating.
00:25:04.180 And a lot of this minimalism, you know, the minimalism fad that we've been going through,
00:25:09.760 whether it's condoing or whatever, right?
00:25:13.840 A lot of it, in many ways, presupposes that we're doing this stuff all the time.
00:25:20.100 We are human beings.
00:25:21.400 We inhale and we exhale.
00:25:23.260 We squeeze and then we release.
00:25:25.700 We're active and then we rest.
00:25:28.320 We're working and then we're playing.
00:25:30.440 And so you do have to understand yourself and the ways in which you compensate and decompensate
00:25:37.260 for the things that take a lot of energy.
00:25:41.040 So if you are focused a lot of energy in cleaning your workspace, you might not focus a lot of
00:25:48.060 energy in, I don't know, cleaning your kitchen, right?
00:25:51.220 The opposite of what a chef does.
00:25:53.220 That there have to be places where we do let ourselves go.
00:25:56.700 And that balance is different for everyone.
00:25:58.840 That's why chefs have messy offices, but pristine kitchen.
00:26:02.700 Some of them don't.
00:26:04.220 Some of them don't.
00:26:05.060 Well, one of the most powerful principles that I got from this book was a chapter on
00:26:10.000 making first moves.
00:26:11.080 And it's this distinction between process and immersive time.
00:26:15.680 And it seems like this is something that I think you like chefs were doing, but they
00:26:19.560 didn't know they were doing it until you showed them that they were doing it.
00:26:22.040 Oh my God.
00:26:23.260 I'm so glad that you picked up on that.
00:26:24.960 Because if you ask me what I learned from doing this book, from writing this book, that was
00:26:32.260 the big takeaway for me.
00:26:34.260 And it runs, flies in the face of almost every personal organization book that I've ever read.
00:26:41.740 You know, Stephen Covey, in many ways, the guru of principled personal organization, has
00:26:48.040 this story about going in front of a bunch of students, and he has this big glass jar
00:26:54.320 and then a box of rocks.
00:26:57.560 And he takes each rock and he puts it in the glass jar until they're poking out the top
00:27:02.060 of the glass jar.
00:27:03.120 And he asks the students, can I get in any more?
00:27:06.780 You know, any more of these?
00:27:08.500 And they say, no.
00:27:10.460 He says, is the jar full?
00:27:12.060 And they say, yes, it's full.
00:27:13.340 And then he takes a box of pebbles out from under the desk and then pours the pebbles
00:27:17.800 in between the rocks till the pebbles come up to the top of the jar.
00:27:21.500 And he says, okay, now is the jar full?
00:27:24.720 And the students say, yes.
00:27:27.440 And then he takes a box of sand and he pours the sand and the sand goes in between the spaces
00:27:33.160 between the rocks and the pebbles.
00:27:34.980 And he says, okay, now is it full?
00:27:37.660 And the students say, yes, it's full.
00:27:39.500 And then he takes a jug of water and he pours the water in the sand in between the pebbles
00:27:45.380 and the rocks.
00:27:47.300 And so when he's done with his exercise, he says, okay, what was the point?
00:27:51.060 What was the point of that?
00:27:52.760 And one student raises her hand and says, the point is you can always fit more in.
00:27:57.600 And he says, no, no.
00:27:59.540 The point is if I didn't put the big rocks in first, how was I going to get the rest of
00:28:04.720 this stuff in?
00:28:06.540 Oh, right.
00:28:07.460 So that is the big realization that Covey brought to personal organization is that the
00:28:14.660 big things, the most important things, the things that take the most time, those are
00:28:19.600 the things you should be doing first.
00:28:21.100 He even wrote a book called First Things First.
00:28:24.200 But my friend, chefs don't work like that.
00:28:28.080 They can't.
00:28:28.700 Because what that ideal of first things first, big rocks first, doesn't take into account
00:28:36.460 is how time actually works and how work actually works in time.
00:28:41.960 That there are two different kinds of work.
00:28:45.300 The work that you do with your hands on, which I'd call immersive work, right?
00:28:50.560 Stuff that needs your hands, your eyes, your senses.
00:28:53.460 And then hands off work, which I'll call process work.
00:28:57.920 Things that you might need to start, but you don't need to be around while they happen.
00:29:04.340 Your hands don't need to be on it.
00:29:06.100 The great example that I love to use from the professional kitchen, actually from the learning
00:29:12.420 kitchens of the CIA, the Culinary Institute, is the student who's thinking, oh, my God, I've
00:29:19.580 got to do the most difficult thing first, the worst, do the worst first, right?
00:29:23.300 So let me do all these vegetable cuts.
00:29:25.320 And it's going to take me hours to do these vegetable cuts.
00:29:28.500 And then the student turns around and realizes that they didn't turn the oven on.
00:29:33.440 And the oven is not warm.
00:29:35.320 And so they can't cook the food.
00:29:37.280 They're going to run behind.
00:29:38.940 Because what they should have done, instead of doing the worst first, is they should have
00:29:44.780 seen what process items they can take care of very quickly or start, what things they
00:29:50.880 can start so that then they can turn their attention to the more immersive tasks.
00:29:56.060 And so there's literally two kinds of time for a chef.
00:29:59.440 There's hands-on time and hands-off time.
00:30:01.840 And those things are always happening together, process time and immersive time.
00:30:05.500 So when we are in our offices and we are immersed, I mean, hey, I mean, just even me getting booked
00:30:14.960 on your podcast, right?
00:30:17.320 I'm in a very immersive time in my own career.
00:30:21.300 So I took a long time answering emails because I wasn't popping up for process time because
00:30:28.020 I'm on a book deadline.
00:30:29.380 And that's a choice I make.
00:30:30.940 But the choice you make when you do that is you create delays for other people.
00:30:36.620 So one of the things we can do, you know, while before we start that long email or report
00:30:43.680 we need to write, we can just pop up for a few minutes and say, okay, who's waiting on
00:30:49.160 me?
00:30:50.180 Who needs a yes or a no from me, a quick thing from me in order that the work, the other
00:30:56.200 work that I don't have to put my hands on can get done or their work can get done.
00:31:02.580 And that's often where a lot of waste comes in in corporate America because you have assistants
00:31:08.000 and middle managers waiting on upper level managers to give them a yes or a no or to
00:31:13.880 read an email or something so they can get going.
00:31:17.040 And so things just wait and wait and wait and wait.
00:31:20.000 And that's where corporate waste really comes in.
00:31:23.560 And that also is a big difference between corporate managers and chefs.
00:31:28.440 I find that there is a certain level of respect that a chef has for his cooks or her cooks that
00:31:36.260 in many ways does not exist in corporate America, where we treat a hierarchy and job titles as
00:31:43.260 an entitlement rather than looking at ourselves as responsible for the efficiency and the success
00:31:51.760 of the people who work beneath us.
00:31:54.800 One thing that's tricky, though, is figuring out what is the difference between process
00:31:57.680 and immersive.
00:31:58.320 Because some people might be like, well, this could be process or no, actually, this is immersive.
00:32:03.100 But I mean, what are some examples of some process work?
00:32:07.020 I mean, would it be just be like answering quick emails that just require yes, no?
00:32:11.220 Yes.
00:32:11.680 Okay.
00:32:11.880 Yes or no answers, quick responses, you know, quick readings of things, making a phone call
00:32:19.340 to book an appointment or something like that.
00:32:21.580 And you can't get all, you know, if you strung a whole bunch of little process things together,
00:32:25.020 it does become an immersive time.
00:32:27.340 So what I do is I schedule buckets of process work in between my immersive time.
00:32:34.040 So as a professor, I have a syllabus to write.
00:32:37.240 But before I do that, I'm going to call the plumber and I'm going to ask my wife this question
00:32:43.000 that I needed to ask her.
00:32:44.300 And then I'm going to go in and I'm going to try to stay as much as I can in that document
00:32:48.840 that I'm writing and not check Twitter too much.
00:32:52.700 And I know afterwards that even though all these emails are coming in, I know that there's
00:32:57.400 a place for them.
00:32:58.880 Think about this.
00:33:00.940 I'm less likely to be distracted by incoming communications if I know that in one hour,
00:33:07.720 I'm going to have a chance to take care of them.
00:33:11.020 Does that make sense?
00:33:11.780 Yeah, that makes sense.
00:33:12.540 So yeah, again, you're going to put this on the calendar.
00:33:14.340 You might block off 30 minutes at the beginning of your day for, I don't know, you can call it
00:33:18.180 admin.
00:33:19.200 Check your email.
00:33:20.240 I call process, right?
00:33:21.400 You call it process, right?
00:33:23.260 Yeah.
00:33:24.120 Okay.
00:33:24.740 And another principle I thought was really incisive too that I didn't think about, but
00:33:28.020 chefs have to figure out and think about is figuring out what, like prioritizing tasks
00:33:32.040 based on what can get finished or not.
00:33:34.380 What does that look like?
00:33:35.520 And why do chefs have to think about that?
00:33:38.220 Well, it's all about cultivating a delivery mentality.
00:33:42.920 There is a great tension between perfection and delivery.
00:33:46.480 And I know that you've experienced times and projects in your life where it's just not there
00:33:53.220 yet and yet the deadline is bearing down.
00:33:56.440 And so it really becomes a trade-off of, you know, how much can I put into this before I
00:34:02.460 really have to let it go?
00:34:04.340 The story that I like to tell, really, it's more a quote from Lorne Michaels, you know,
00:34:09.240 the founder of and the producer of Saturday Night Live going on, you know, upwards to
00:34:13.920 50 years now.
00:34:15.380 He says, we don't go on.
00:34:17.780 We don't go live, you know, because we're ready.
00:34:20.980 We go live because it's 1130.
00:34:24.980 Right?
00:34:25.780 There's a certain point where the discussion has to stop and we have to think about delivering.
00:34:31.320 And the greatest chefs know, like Thomas Keller, right?
00:34:35.880 The greatest chefs know is that you need deadlines and you need to deliver so that you can get
00:34:41.300 the feedback to make whatever you're doing better.
00:34:46.220 So, you know, there are many artist types, you know, especially I teach in an art school
00:34:51.860 where people will just hold on to stuff.
00:34:53.960 It's not ready.
00:34:54.660 It's not ready.
00:34:55.200 It's not ready.
00:34:55.620 And then they never deliver.
00:34:56.600 And then that's, that becomes a legacy of failure because they're afraid of criticism.
00:35:03.160 They're afraid of feedback.
00:35:05.720 And what I try to get my students to do is to create with a sense of urgency.
00:35:12.420 You know, every day you're going to start writing a song and every day you're going to finish
00:35:16.240 writing a song.
00:35:18.180 That's, you know, it's, it's a habit to get into.
00:35:21.780 We have to start, you know, there's this sense that chefs are artists.
00:35:26.600 We cultivate that in our media and, but really a true chef is a craft craftsperson first.
00:35:36.880 And so a chef practices her craft and the art comes from the religious, relentless practice,
00:35:47.760 efficient practice of that craft.
00:35:49.740 That is the space where true artistry is born.
00:35:52.520 It's not born in a moment of inspiration, right?
00:35:56.560 That just compels you to dive into your work and you come out five hours later or five days
00:36:02.700 later with something brilliant.
00:36:04.320 No, it happens in the drudgery and the, and the monotony of, of the everyday practice of the craft.
00:36:12.420 So when people watch these chef shows, it looks like it's crazy in there.
00:36:17.420 And as you said, but it might look crazy, but there's, they got the, the chefs have the
00:36:21.320 mise en place in place.
00:36:23.280 So there's this eye of the storm.
00:36:25.600 It's like you make this case that chefs actually slow down so they can speed up.
00:36:29.420 But like, why does it look like they're running around?
00:36:31.740 There's Gordon Ramsey yelling at people.
00:36:33.780 Is mise en place going on there?
00:36:35.500 We just don't know it.
00:36:36.240 Well, I think that you're describing a whole bunch of different kinds of situations, right?
00:36:40.800 So let's take, um, let's take a, a, a chopped, right?
00:36:44.800 Where, you know, you have four contestants all competing with each other and running against
00:36:48.960 the clock.
00:36:49.620 Often you find a lot of the mistakes happen when cooks do not slow down to speed up,
00:36:56.960 right?
00:36:57.220 They're doing things.
00:36:58.000 They're getting panicked.
00:36:58.860 They're forgetting things.
00:37:00.640 Working slowly and deliberately is always going to Trump working super fast.
00:37:06.060 And thoughtlessly and messily.
00:37:09.020 So, you know, watch, watch chop with that eye, with an eye towards who has good mise en place
00:37:15.580 and who doesn't.
00:37:17.080 And often it's the mise en place that goes hand in hand with the craft and the skill because
00:37:21.880 those skills are developed hand in hand.
00:37:24.880 Then, you know, when we're talking about like a Robert Irvine or Gordon Ramsey, the, you know,
00:37:30.440 the chefs who come in and, and seem to be yelling.
00:37:32.760 I think a lot of, first of all, yelling culture in kitchens has definitely subsided over the
00:37:38.520 past few decades as the window towards that world has been exposed.
00:37:43.520 But I also think that there is something about the environment of the kitchen that, that in
00:37:47.940 many sometimes requires the raised voice, which is not always an angry voice, but it also requires,
00:37:54.780 there's, I suppose, you know, I have somebody who used to call it the Saturn teacher, the
00:38:00.680 teacher who teaches through difficulty, right?
00:38:04.060 And that cooks sometimes teach through a bit of sarcasm, a bit of, you know, what are you
00:38:10.820 doing?
00:38:11.340 Like, what are you doing?
00:38:12.520 Think about what you're doing.
00:38:14.020 Stop, right?
00:38:15.260 Like, how is that going to work?
00:38:18.080 What, you know, how is deviating from the process I gave you?
00:38:22.680 It's very simple, right?
00:38:24.540 How is deviating from that process going to help you and help me?
00:38:27.820 You're killing our service right now.
00:38:30.620 So I think that chefs can be very tough teachers, but I also think that, that they teach toughness
00:38:39.400 and that sometimes the price for being able to learn toughness is to have a tough teacher.
00:38:47.700 Does that make sense?
00:38:48.880 Yeah, that makes sense.
00:38:49.780 Well, let's kind of continue on this idea of communication because in the corporate world,
00:38:53.340 that's where a lot of inefficiencies are.
00:38:55.860 Emails, okay, it's on, sometimes on Slack.
00:38:57.880 Did you get my phone call?
00:38:58.960 Did you get the memo?
00:38:59.880 Do people still fax?
00:39:01.760 Maybe.
00:39:02.500 But there's, there's multiple streams of communication going on.
00:39:05.140 Yep.
00:39:05.300 You can't have that in the kitchen.
00:39:06.740 Like everyone's got to be in the same stream.
00:39:08.500 So how do chefs manage communication in the kitchen so that everyone knows what's going on?
00:39:14.420 Well, the system that, the system is called call and callback.
00:39:19.060 You know, you've heard it.
00:39:19.980 If you've ever seen a movie or a clip of a professional kitchen, you know, the chef will
00:39:24.940 act as in many ways as expediter, meaning the person who calls out the orders as they
00:39:31.100 come in.
00:39:31.900 And the chef actually is the traffic cop.
00:39:34.380 He directs the flow of work in the kitchen.
00:39:37.240 So an order will come in from the dining room and the chef will call out to the line
00:39:42.300 cooks, the people who actually make the food, two lamb, medium rare, two salads, and one
00:39:48.660 filet.
00:39:49.020 And so the grill person will have to call back, yes, chef, two lamb, medium rare, one filet.
00:39:57.100 And then the guard manger will say, yes, chef, two salads.
00:40:01.300 And there are two parts of that communication.
00:40:03.160 The first is the call back, letting the chef know that they've received that information.
00:40:09.140 And it also puts it in their own mind because they have to remember that stuff.
00:40:14.040 But also, yes, chef, right?
00:40:17.200 And that isn't just about subordinating yourself to someone.
00:40:22.200 It's actually about what the chef owes you, right?
00:40:25.320 Because what the chef is going to do that your corporate boss won't always do, and I'll give
00:40:33.240 you a good example of this, is protect you from too much work.
00:40:39.960 The chef is not going to let the grill get flooded, swamped, right, or slammed.
00:40:47.380 They're going to pace the orders so that the cooks can do their job and deliver.
00:40:54.400 And what I have found in many bad companies or poorly run companies in which I have worked
00:41:02.300 is that you will have a senior manager who goes into a meeting with the president of the
00:41:09.660 company, and there's some new directive that comes down for a good reason, or maybe it's
00:41:16.640 just a thought that the CEO had.
00:41:20.280 And then the senior manager goes to the middle manager and says, okay, well, everybody needs
00:41:23.900 to drop what they're doing and do this.
00:41:26.580 And you say to your boss, well, I understand you wanted me to finish this thing, but now
00:41:32.620 you want me to drop it and do this.
00:41:34.320 I can't deliver both of these in time.
00:41:36.440 Well, nope, sorry, got to do it.
00:41:38.220 We all got to hunker down around here.
00:41:40.260 We all got to put in more hours around here.
00:41:41.960 You see the insanity of that is that there is a certain, in good managers, both in the
00:41:50.560 kitchen and in the professional office, there is a sense of responsibility downward that you
00:41:57.980 do have to protect and respect the things that make the people who work for you efficient
00:42:05.260 and inefficient.
00:42:06.020 And in corporations, a lot of that time, it's about whim and whimsy and doing things
00:42:13.380 because the boss just told you to do them and there's no pushback on it.
00:42:16.860 It's just like the employees are just this endless well into which management can dip.
00:42:24.140 And it's infuriating.
00:42:25.400 And I didn't really see another way until I saw the professional kitchen because a chef
00:42:33.580 can't play magical thinking with her own time.
00:42:38.200 And so she can't do that with her cooks either because she knows.
00:42:44.100 She knows that time doesn't work like that.
00:42:46.400 It's not a bottomless pit, right?
00:42:49.000 It's not an endless well in which there is no bottom.
00:42:53.040 There is going to be a bottom.
00:42:54.100 And I think that's one of the great hidden things, hidden blessings of Mise en Place.
00:43:00.740 Well, it sounds like, yeah, chefs just squared the circle with, you know, because like, yeah,
00:43:04.300 like you said, a lot of people don't realize when they're managing, like a chef, they have
00:43:08.540 two people they're taking care of.
00:43:09.980 They got the customer they got to take care of, but like the customer interests sometimes
00:43:13.720 conflict with the worker's interest.
00:43:15.680 But the chefs have to figure out how to balance those two competing interests so that everyone
00:43:20.140 has an enjoyable evening and work gets done.
00:43:21.880 Yeah, and that's why the chef gets the big bucks.
00:43:25.260 It's not to, you know, just dump work on folks.
00:43:29.000 You really do.
00:43:31.200 The respect goes both ways.
00:43:32.620 I often, one of the things, one of the conceits of the modern office that I find to be the
00:43:40.600 most abhorrent is this idea that we're all family.
00:43:45.620 You'll hear this in a lot of companies.
00:43:47.060 We're all family here, right?
00:43:49.480 Please call me Bob, right?
00:43:52.160 Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:43:55.080 Don't pretend that it's a family.
00:43:57.120 Don't pretend that there's not a hierarchy.
00:43:59.280 Don't pretend that you're one of us.
00:44:02.180 You're not, right?
00:44:04.020 You're actually a chef and you have to act like one.
00:44:08.440 And that not only means that you have the responsibility to meet out work, but it also means you have
00:44:15.860 the responsibility to protect the growth and the individual mise en place of your workers
00:44:22.820 and to encourage that.
00:44:23.960 And then also, I mean, as you said earlier, this idea of presence of mise en place, like
00:44:28.280 for the chef to be able to know whether the grill line is getting slammed, like he has
00:44:31.980 to be aware, but also he has to be aware, like, are we running out of ingredients?
00:44:35.340 Do we need to prep more stuff for that?
00:44:37.320 Like, so how do they, is that just something that comes with practice?
00:44:39.920 They develop that ability to know what's going on in all parts of the kitchen.
00:44:43.140 You know, there's a line from Bill Murray's movie, Groundhog Day, you know, where he said,
00:44:50.680 you know, maybe God, you know, maybe God isn't omniscient.
00:44:55.780 Maybe he's just been around so long that he just knows everything, you know, he's, you know,
00:45:00.100 learned everybody's names and knows how everything works, right?
00:45:02.740 So a chef is just a cook who's been around for a long, long time and has developed some
00:45:09.580 sensory and sometimes extrasensory things.
00:45:13.620 So yeah, you know, there is, there is a point where mastery sets in and maybe that list is
00:45:20.580 in your head because it's just been in there day after day after day after day.
00:45:25.280 But what gets you to that point are the good habits of mise en place, the good habits of
00:45:31.060 the checklist and the calendar, the good habits of cleaning as you go, the good habits of starting
00:45:36.740 immediately, the good habits of finishing.
00:45:39.440 All of those things go into that mastery.
00:45:41.500 Well, what's amazing with you've taken all this stuff and you do this at the end of the
00:45:45.020 book, you've actually created like an organizational system.
00:45:47.860 You become like a Stephen Covey or a David Allen and you've created like, and it's, I mean,
00:45:52.480 I found it really useful.
00:45:53.720 I mean, I've already been using some of these principles, but like big picture, like what
00:45:56.640 does it involve?
00:45:57.060 Just sort of daily planning and clean, like just putting these things we've been talking
00:46:00.480 about into practice.
00:46:01.480 Yeah.
00:46:02.480 I mean, for me, it shakes out as an unshakable daily commitment, 30 minutes a day to cleaning
00:46:09.680 my station, to whether that station is my actual desktop or my computer or my phone, right?
00:46:15.540 That things are going to get taken care of.
00:46:17.540 And, you know, actually just a little plug, you know, one of the, one of the tools that I've
00:46:22.160 found really, really helpful lately for managing email is this new service called Hey, H-E-Y.com.
00:46:29.480 Yeah.
00:46:29.980 I saw your email and I was like, what is this?
00:46:31.780 I checked it out.
00:46:32.560 It looked pretty cool.
00:46:33.540 It's so, um, it is, it comes the closest I've seen to getting you to a place of cleanliness
00:46:43.520 with your inbox situation.
00:46:45.720 It still takes maintenance.
00:46:46.940 There's no algorithm that's going to do it for you.
00:46:50.180 That's why a lot of these sort of calendar things like, you know, that your calendar will
00:46:54.560 schedule your lunchtime for you.
00:46:56.520 Like, give me a break.
00:46:58.060 AI is not going to do it.
00:47:00.000 It's just not.
00:47:01.480 You have to do it.
00:47:02.940 You are the one who has to clean every day.
00:47:05.940 You have to clean your station.
00:47:07.940 You have to plan your life.
00:47:10.400 You have to make the choices.
00:47:12.080 Do I do this today or do I not do this today?
00:47:14.900 It doesn't work any other way.
00:47:16.700 You can use tools.
00:47:17.960 There are always tools that will help us do that.
00:47:20.940 But ultimately, you're the person who has to do it.
00:47:23.960 So the way that it shows up for me is I sit down at my desk and I go through, I clean all
00:47:29.480 my tools, you know, take the receipts out of my wallet, put them in the inbox, take stuff
00:47:33.860 out of my bag that I had for the day, put it in the inbox, you know, so that I'm not
00:47:38.160 looking for stuff all day long.
00:47:39.940 Everything's in one place.
00:47:40.800 And then I take the stuff out of my inbox and put it where it's supposed to go.
00:47:44.240 I look at my calendar.
00:47:46.060 I make sure that I don't have too much to do that day.
00:47:48.800 I make sure that the things I want to do are squared with my schedule and everything that
00:47:52.800 I feel like I can't do today, I move to the next day or a few days after just because
00:47:58.520 you got to do it.
00:48:00.820 Otherwise, you're going to let your calendar make that choice for you.
00:48:04.040 Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation.
00:48:05.460 Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?
00:48:07.320 You can go to workclean.com, all one word, W-O-R-K-C-L-E-A-N.com or alternately, everything.place.
00:48:20.080 And there's more information about the book and the system there.
00:48:23.020 All right.
00:48:23.260 Well, Dan Charnas, thanks for your time.
00:48:24.420 It's been a pleasure.
00:48:25.540 Oh, pleasure here.
00:48:27.780 My guest there is Dan Charnas.
00:48:28.900 He's the author of the book, Everything in Its Place.
00:48:30.780 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:48:32.940 You can find out more information about his work at his website, workclean.com.
00:48:36.140 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash workclean.
00:48:39.080 You can find links to resources.
00:48:40.180 We can delve deeper into this topic.
00:48:48.340 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:48:50.920 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives,
00:48:54.080 as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you
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00:49:10.020 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review
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00:49:13.740 It helps that a lot.
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00:49:19.780 As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:49:21.600 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.
00:49:23.020 Remind you not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
00:49:26.260 Thank you.
00:49:45.900 We'll be right back.