From a Mess to Mise en place
Mise en place (Pronounced : me-zohn plahs) is a French phrase translating to "put in place"
Before I discovered Mise en place my life was a mess.
During my four years of Engineering, I learnt enough technical skills like statistical analysis and forecasting models to prepare me for a job as a demand planner. But formal education fell short of teaching me how to handle a workload. Because of which, during the initial months of my first job, I was constantly panicking and quite frazzled.
To draw an analogy from the movie Ratatouille, the rat was in control of me. I would relegate planning to the margins of my schedule and as a result, I spent a lot of time and energy on the hamster wheel playing catch up. It often felt like I was running as hard as I could just to stand still.
Discovering MEP was life altering.
MEP is a personal organization system devised by chefs. But for those who truly understand it, it is a way of life.
Here are 4 cornerstone principles of MEP that have helped me channel my inner chef and move from being a mess to being mise en place!
1. Be honest with time
Most of us fall on 2 ends of the planning spectrum. We're either under planners with an immense belief in the concept of "winging it". Or we are over planners who fight time and try to cram too much into a single day. What we need instead is a chef’s unrelenting honesty about the limits of time.
The first step to implementing MEP is creating a time log by tracking how we spend our time. This will help us understand how much time our regular, recurring tasks actually require. This also helps us arrive at our mise point - the optimal number of actions/tasks/meetings we can put on our daily to-do list before we begin to overwhelm ourselves.
I used an excel sheet to track my time for over a month and realised that my mise point is 5. Knowing this data point about myself enables me to make sure that I’m not overcommitting to a point of burnout while also making sure that I’m challenging myself and delivering on commitments.
2. Create a daily mise
A daily mise is a time to clean our physical and virtual spaces, clear our mind and plot our day. For knowledge workers, a daily mise boils down to two things:
Achieving Desktop zero
Listing our To-do's and sequencing them
Desktop zero is closing all our browser tabs and shutting down the computer at the end of the day. This is still an aspirational goal for me as I am someone who has at least 15 tabs open at any point of time. The goal of this routine is to streamline and prioritize the things that are pending instead of keeping them open in tabs. It also helps to create boundaries between work and life.
The other aspect of a daily mise is to list all our To-do’s, sequence all of them based on an impact vs effort analysis and add them to our calendar.
Taking 30 minutes at the end of everyday to do this can be a life changing experience. I notice a significant difference in my productivity on days I do this vs on days that I don’t.
3. Make first moves
A Chef deals with a barrage of incoming orders by first setting a pan on the stove. That pan isn’t just a pan. It is also a placeholder reminding him that a dish is in process. Such actions are called “first moves,” and they become especially important when multiple requests arrive at the same time.
On an average day, I receive multiple requests from various channels like email, phone, WhatsApp and Slack. I make sure to take some action on each request as it arrives to not only build momentum but also create placeholders in my environment which will serve as a reminder for the task. This also saves me the effort of keeping track of everything in my head and is hands down my favourite productivity hack!
4. Finish actions
In cooking, a dish that is 99% finished has zero value. Because of this brutal reality, chefs adopt a “finishing mindset.”
A task once finished does not need attention or memory. On the other hand, an unfinished task needs both to be completed. To adopt a finishing mindset, ask yourself every time you start a project: “How and when will I finish this?” Of course it's not always possible to finish what you started. In which case it's important to tie up the loose ends in the easiest possible way to be resumed later. At any cost, avoid "orphaned tasks''.
If you're someone like me who suffers from shiny object syndrome and can't help but be attracted to new projects, set yourself a hard rule to not have more than X open projects at any given point (For me, this number is 3). This is important if you don't want a reputation as a pilot who only takes off but never lands!
The idea behind MEP is that you plan and prepare for what you can so you can deal with what you can't. Use these 4 principles to channel your inner chef and enable him/her to be your shield against entropy!
This article is inspired by the book Work Clean by Dan Charnas. It has made me completely rethink the way I work and I would highly recommend it.
