Book Recommendation: Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind by Dan Charnas

By Jonah Goldberg

Work Clean (later republished under the title Everything in its Place) is the product of two years of interviews and shadowing of the CIA’s top graduates. Author Dan Charnas presents a revolutionary productivity and organization philosophy developed in one of the few places where there must be zero tolerance for delays: world-class restaurants. At the CIA—that is, the Culinary Institute of America—chefs are instructed in mise en place, a system and philosophy for churning out high-quality work with incomparable efficiency. Work Clean translates mise en place for business, with concrete habits and recommendations listed at the end of each chapter to help you implement this system into your own life and work.

Charnas was no stranger to the breadth of self-help books already published when he began Work Clean, and in the introduction he compliments The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Getting Things Done for their wise strategies. So why was yet another book needed? In Charnas’ view, most self-help philosophy does not sufficiently take into account the person, or the body, that needs to execute the tasks. The author writes that one’s calendar and to-do list should be in sync, as should organizing our physical and mental space:

“Organizing is not an intellectual exercise. We must also know how to handle the mental, emotional, and physical challenges and resistance we all encounter. In other words, we don’t just need strategies and systems. We also suffer for the lack of guiding principles that account for all our human dimensions.”

Charnas’ promise is that mise en place can be that all-encompassing set of guiding principles, and his book delivers. Each chapter discusses one “ingredient” of mise en place by opening with an illustration of a top chef, then describing the principle, and closing with specific steps for implementation. The book as a whole follows this same structure. It begins with a comparison between the kitchen and the office environments, to establish why chefs had a need to perfect their environment while corporate structures can tolerate a comparatively high amount of waste and missed communication—a half-completed report won’t rot if it is not attended to after all, and generally kitchens work by the hour while even newspapers mark deadlines by the day. Similarly, the book’s final chapter is a detailed outline of what a typical day and week look like under the mise en place system, with instructions on the time set aside for preparation each day (the “daily meeze”) that holds the system together.

One chapter offering a powerful change in mindset is “Making First Moves.” The cooking component here is simple, one that you may have faced while following a recipe. You spend 20 minutes preparing ingredients to put in the oven, and only realize after that you forgot to turn on the oven to preheat it. Or maybe this morning you made your breakfast before starting the coffee, and they were not ready at the same time. Had you begun with thinking in process time before engaging in immersive time by doing the hands-on task, you would not have had to wait at all to complete your meal.

Applying this to business can be counterintuitive, especially as other productivity models suggest beginning your day with focused work on your biggest and most difficult task. However, we can all benefit from the dual time that chefs operate in. If you are leading a team, one of your colleagues may need you to sign off on something before they can deliver it. If you have to finish a deep work session before you take this request, your work may have gotten done faster, but you have held your colleague back from finishing their task, decreasing the productivity of the team.

Charnas advises figuring out which of your tasks need immersive time and which need process time, then scheduling blocks for both throughout your day, tweaking the ratio based on what you find to work best for your position. He specifically recommends having process time windows at the start of your day, and after long meetings so that you can set action items in motion.

While computer technology has not greatly changed the workflow in kitchens, mise en place also bears on our digital organization. The chapter “Call and Callback” stresses immediate, clear communication. As an example, if a customer orders a steak with fries and a salad, the cooks at each of these three stations need to coordinate their timing so that the fries are not left soggy on the plate while the steak finishes cooking. Consequently, cooks and chefs are constantly calling out commands and updates, and in a well-run restaurant, communication is action-oriented and responsive, similar to how one baseball player might yell “I got it!” so that not everyone runs toward the ball and leaves another area of the field open.

One of Charnas’ suggestions to manage the many channels of communication we have to navigate in the office is to consolidate your streams. If you have multiple email addresses, set up a forwarding system or try to phase one address out. Use only email alerts for other apps as well, so that you can check most of your notifications in one place. 

This streamlining can also be applied to using personal knowledge management software, like Evernote and Notion, which only grew in popularity after the publishing of Work Clean in 2016. These applications have a wide reach today; you can link an e-reader for book notes, and apps like Airr even allow for instantly pulling podcast quotes into your notes. I personally recommend finding an application software with bidirectional linking, like Roam Research, which means that if I were to tag “Productivity” in my notes on Work Clean, then the book would also automatically show up as a tag on my Productivity page. Keeping all of your knowledge in one place allows you to access all of your ingredients more easily.

Among the other productivity books I’ve read, Work Clean provides uniquely concrete advice. The chef anecdotes illustrate the lesson of each chapter clearly without stealing the spotlight from its applications outside of the culinary world. Whether you’re looking to declutter your space, keep the rush of work out of your home, or manage projects or your own time more effectively, there is a lot to learn from mise en place.