Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  “Yo, Jeremy, I need your help!” His designer Robert had computer trouble, and Jeremy prided himself on being able to unstick folks. When he saw that the fix would take longer than expected, he asked Michelle to print out the photos for the Web site.

  Jeremy returned 20 minutes later to see that Michelle had nicely fanned the photos out on his desk. While he reviewed them, the receptionist came by and tossed his mail on top of the photos. Jeremy was annoyed but let it go. He perched the mail on his teetering inbox, and, seconds later, everything fell out onto his desk. Jeremy began to replace the pile when he heard Stephen’s voice.

  “Let’s go, guys!” 10:00 a.m. Staff meeting time. Jeremy hunted for his notebook. Not finding it, he grabbed a pen and a sheet of blank paper out of the printer and headed into the conference room. Stephen smiled at Jeremy and greeted the staff before starting.

  But Jeremy’s mind drifted. His pre-meeting efficiency plans dashed, he obsessed about the coming avalanche of Web site work. . . .

  “ . . . Jeremy, are you good with that?”

  Embarrassed, Jeremy nodded instead of admitting that he hadn’t heard what his boss said. When it came time for Jeremy to give his update on the Web site, Stephen asked: “What’s hosting and data services going to cost us?”

  “I have the quotes,” Jeremy replied. “Mind if I jump out and get them?”

  Jeremy hustled to his desk and . . . Shoot! Where were the quotes? He remembered putting them on his desk. Michelle had put the photos for the Web site on top of them. Jeremy realized that he must have moved the sheet into his inbox after it toppled over. No time to find them now.

  When Jeremy returned to the meeting, Stephen had another question: “How’s it going with the deck?”

  The presentation! Jeremy was supposed to have proofed it before the meeting and sent it to the copier.

  “On its way,” Jeremy lied.

  “Great,” Stephen replied. “Can you review it with me at four, after the brainstorming meeting?”

  Jeremy squirmed until the meeting ended. If he completed that presentation by noon, he could still get it back from the copier by 4:00 p.m.

  When the meeting ended, Jeremy darted back to his desk. Now he resolved to shut everyone and everything out until he finished that presentation. Michelle told him something about the copywriter’s contract, and he grunted and kept working. He spent 10 minutes searching and scrolling in his e-mail program to find one piece of data for a slide. Then he saw another e-mail reminding him that expenses were due at 3:00 p.m. He had to get those done; he and his wife needed the money to cover Adam’s summer camp. It was noon. He just had to finish proofing first. . . .

  “Jeremy, can you come in here?” Stephen beckoned Jeremy into a meeting with Aaron, the business affairs guy, who said: “Before I approve these photo shoot invoices, I need the release forms for the models.” The blood in Jeremy’s head rushed down to his feet. He hadn’t remembered to bring the release forms to the photo shoot. A rookie mistake, and he was no rookie. Jeremy could see the surprise and disappointment on Stephen’s face when he confessed as much. “How are we going to launch a Web site next week if we haven’t gotten these releases?” Aaron asked.

  “I’ll fix it today,” Jeremy replied.

  “And remember, three o’clock!” Aaron said.

  Yes, Jeremy thought, expenses due at 3:00 p.m.

  Now he careened through proofing the presentation. At 12:30 p.m., he asked Michelle to take the file to the copier and beg them for a rush.

  “I was about to do something for John,” she said. John sighed and waved her off. Jeremy thanked him. Jeremy couldn’t find his portable drive. Michelle used hers and bolted.

  Now the expenses. He picked through his inbox for the envelope with his business trip receipts. It was time to clean this damn inbox. Filing exhausted Jeremy because he had to keep turning around and bending down to the cabinet behind him. Just thinking about it exhausted him. He made a mental note to get one of those desktop files. Jeremy searched for 5 minutes before realizing he must have left the envelope at home. He’d have to submit the receipts he had on hand, which was about half of what he was due.

  Jeremy searched for his cell phone to call the modeling agency, but where was his phone? A minute later, Jeremy found it in his jacket and saw that his ringer was still off, and that he had missed two calls from Michelle. He called her back. She said that they could do the printing and binding by 5:00 p.m., but it would cost 50 percent more for the rush. He’d have to tell Stephen about the delay.

  At 2:00 p.m. Jeremy finished his expenses and clicked “Print.” After no breakfast, maybe it was time to go out and grab a quick lunch? But Jeremy wasted another 15 minutes: Walking to the printer, he zagged for the bathroom instead. Walking back to his desk, he forgot about the printer. Walking to the printer, he forgot his stapler.

  At 2:35 p.m., in line for food, he felt his phone buzz. His ringer was still off. It was Michelle asking if he was coming to the 2:30 p.m. brainstorming meeting. The meeting! All this preparation, and he hadn’t actually put it in his calendar. He raced back to the office. Stephen didn’t look up when he entered. Jeremy had read everybody’s proposals last night and had told himself he’d make notes in the morning, a half-hour that he had slept through. He sulked and said little during the meeting.

  After, he pulled Stephen’s coat to tell him that the presentations wouldn’t be ready until five. Could he postpone the run-through until 5:30 p.m. just to be safe?

  “Sure,” Stephen said. “I’ve got a dinner at 6:00 p.m. and a red-eye flight tonight.”

  What a day. Jeremy rang his new copywriter, Janet, and took 30 minutes to discuss the Web site. At the end of the conversation, Janet asked when she would be receiving her contract. “End of day,” said Jeremy, remembering now that Michelle had said something about that contract. Right! He had to get a form to Aaron to get him to generate the contract. At 4:00 p.m. he e-mailed it to Aaron. But since he wanted to make sure Aaron didn’t miss it, Jeremy walked over to his office. It was dark and empty. His assistant was gone, too.

  “I think he’s gone for the day,” one of the finance people said. “He’s flying out with Stephen tonight.”

  Cherisse, the director of human resources, tapped Jeremy on his shoulder. “Evaluations?”

  Back at his desk, Jeremy asked Michelle to fetch the presentations from the copy place.

  “I’m doing something for John,” she replied.

  “Can it wait?” Jeremy asked. “I’ve got to stay here and do these evaluations. Including yours.”

  Jeremy felt horrible the moment he said those last two words. But he was panicking.

  John stood up. Not happy.

  “Dude, are you threatening her?” John asked. Jeremy said no and apologized.

  “Find someone else to go,” John said.

  Jeremy was so mortified he just ran to the copier himself. The evals would have to wait.

  At 5:30 p.m., Jeremy walked into Stephen’s office with an armful of presentations, 20 in all. Stephen was itching to leave. All business now.

  “So are we going to get those releases from the modeling agency tomorrow?” he said.

  Damn! He had meant to call the modeling agency and then got distracted by those calls from Michelle.

  “I hope to,” Jeremy exhaled, sweating. “But listen, do you think you can lean on Aaron to get me the contract for the copywriter as soon as possible? I didn’t know Aaron was leaving early today.”

  Stephen looked up, incredulous. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No,” Jeremy said, “I went over to his office at four, and he was gone.”

  “I mean ‘Are you kidding me?’” Stephen replied. “Aaron told you in the staff meeting that he’d write the contract before he left if you got him the form by three o’clock. I asked you, ‘Jeremy, are you good with that?’ and you sat there in that meeting and nodded yes. Now you’re telling me you don’t remember?” Stephen sighed, picked up a presentat
ion booklet, and paged through it.

  “Where are my changes?” he said, looking at Jeremy. “The changes I asked you to make?”

  Jeremy had been in such a rush to complete the presentation that he had forgotten about the e-mail with extra changes that Stephen had sent him yesterday after seeing the draft.

  “Shit,” Jeremy said, shaking his head.

  “Yep, shit. Spelling errors, too.”

  Stephen dropped the booklet, inhaled sharply, and rose, grabbing his jacket. It was 5:45 p.m. “I’ve got to go to this dinner. I need you to redo this now. Go to the copy place and stay there until they’re done. I wanted to take them on the plane with me, but if you can get them to express mail tonight, I can get them in the hotel by morning.”

  Stephen looked at the mass of bound presentations on his desk. About $200 worth of paper and plastic, Jeremy thought.

  “What a waste,” Stephen said, as if reading Jeremy’s mind. “How much did this cost us?”

  Stephen walked out of the door, leaving Jeremy. “Get it done,” he heard Stephen say.

  Jeremy felt his phone ringing. He pulled it out of his pocket. 6:00 p.m. His wife calling. Adam’s soccer game! Jeremy was about to have one more difficult conversation in a day that already had more of them than he could remember.

  He hoped tomorrow would be a better day.

  JEREMY’S PROBLEM

  Jeremy’s story is familiar to those of us who work in offices. Perhaps we haven’t had one day go so wrong, but most people who make a living with words, images, and numbers struggle with overwhelming workload and communication and make many of the same errors.

  Jeremy’s problem isn’t poor character. His intentions are honorable: to be a good husband and father, to provide for his family, to succeed at his new job, to create an excellent product, to work hard, to please his boss and honor his colleagues. At work, he’s generous to a fault: helping his coworkers even when it takes time away from his own tasks and being cordial to the receptionist when he’s within his rights to request some different behavior from her.

  His problem isn’t work ethic. Jeremy works at a furious pace. He doesn’t “steal” time from the company by gossiping or playing video games or browsing social media at his desk. If anything, he’s stealing time from himself when he shortens his lunch break. Even his distractedness in meetings comes from a desire to be working.

  His problem isn’t self-discipline. He does have the will and ability to focus.

  His problem isn’t lack of skill. He knows how to create great Web sites and visual presentations; it’s why his boss hired him in the first place.

  Jeremy’s problem is this: He doesn’t have a philosophy and a system that will help him do all the other things he does. He has the requisite skills to work; he just doesn’t know how to handle a workload. Jeremy spent tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to understand art, design, and language. He spent years acquiring knowledge of code and the workings of the Internet, and experience in testing his ideas. But his formal education never included instruction on how to organize and conduct his workflow; and by the time he was a professional, there were few opportunities or incentives to learn. He has inner discipline to work longer and harder, but he doesn’t follow an outer discipline—a body of principles and behaviors—to guide his considerable will and skill. As a result, Jeremy can’t execute the work he’s trained to do. He gets frustrated and panics, and he’s not great at handling those emotions. So he makes mistakes that jeopardize his business and says things that damage his relationships.

  Like Jeremy, we may have a personal abundance of talent, energy, and resources. But we remain overwhelmed by the amount of work we have to do, and a big part of our being overwhelmed comes because we have never been taught how to manage that work. Even doctors and lawyers confide that they didn’t learn many of the essentials of their professions in school. Near the top of that list for them, and for us, is how to prepare, how to create order, and how to prioritize the work at hand.

  Almost all modern work requires personal organization. And yet, as in the other half of our lives—personal relationships—little comprehensive training exists. We enter into the chaos of both arenas of our adult lives with minimal counsel and are expected to wing it. At least when we falter in our relationships, psychotherapists are there to help us pick up the pieces. When we get reprimanded on the job or fired, we’re pretty much on our own. In the absence of a formal education in organization, we’ve had to help ourselves.

  SURVIVAL SYSTEMS

  “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1954, quoting an unnamed college president. In his speech, Eisenhower pointed to what he called a dilemma of modern man: “The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

  Eisenhower’s wisdom was years ahead of its time at the dawn of the corporate era; the tides of personal organization products and literature wouldn’t begin coming in until the 1980s and 1990s. Eisenhower’s ideas appeared in the writings of the first big productivity and time-management guru, Stephen R. Covey. Beginning in 1989, millions of people bought Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which outlined a principle-centered approach to order and organization. Covey argued that the pressure of our daily tasks diminishes when we consider the bigger picture of our life and legacy. His 1994 book, First Things First, repurposed Eisenhower’s ideas as a matrix into which tasks could be sorted and executed, with the “Important” and “Urgent” on two separate, intersecting axes, thus creating four “boxes,” or “quadrants.” Covey urged his readers to escape the culture of urgency and do important things first.

  In 2001, David Allen’s book Getting Things Done offered one of the most comprehensive systems yet for managing daily work and introduced a powerful concept for prioritizing: In all projects, keep a focus on the “next action.” By the turn of the millennium, both Covey and Allen had created huge training businesses, salvation systems serving corporations and individuals who couldn’t get that kind of education elsewhere.

  All told, Americans spend more than $10 billion a year on self-help products, including organization books, tools, seminars, and software. The digital age was supposed to quicken our pace and lighten our load but it has largely done the opposite. The benefits of the tools that allow us to work faster have been overshadowed by the distractions of an Internet-driven information deluge, by the temptation to multitask, and by the increasing workloads brought on by job consolidation. Now we need to be saved from our digital devices as well. Web sites on “lifehacking” abound with the latest ideas and concepts in organization. We are drowning in salvation.

  What most of these techniques lack is a holistic approach. One strategy is not a complete system. A great method for arranging our space, for example, may not include guidance for organizing our time. And even a comprehensive system may not take into account the person who has to make that system work. Organization doesn’t entail only manipulating objects around us—where things go and how tasks should be handled—it needs to deal with our internal environment as well. 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.

  Such a set of principles exists. It is a body of knowledge that carries the heft of history and the benefits of widespread practice. It is mise-en-place.

  KITCHEN VERSUS OFFICE

  The Zen-like work habits of so-called blue-collar cooks in the best kitchens stand in stark contrast to the wastefulness of the white-collar world of messy desks, endless meetings, bottomless e-mail chains, and general half-assedness that plagues even the best of companies.

  But is it fair to compare the kitchen to the office?

  The kitchen and office share some qualities. Workers in both places must c
ontend with a deluge of tasks under tremendous deadline pressure and often inadequate resources. In both environments, workers face a constant stream of inputs and requests, too little time to process them, and many tasks demanding simultaneous attention.

  But, as chefs will tell you, the kitchen is a world apart from the office. Kitchens are places of great consistency. Cooks do the same things over and over every day. The menu largely remains the same. The processes that create those menu items don’t change. The schedule and setup for that work—when and where things happen—remain constant. Cooks don’t have to field e-mails while they sauté, and their prep work isn’t interrupted by 2-hour-long staff meetings. Offices can be places of inconsistency. Our jobs—not our titles, but what we actually do—change from day to day and sometimes hour by hour. In the morning, we take meetings and roll phone calls; in the afternoon, we write e-mails or learn a new piece of software. Our schedules and setups fluctuate: We might work in the office one day and at a conference or on an airplane the next. As a result, regimenting and streamlining the flow of work is much easier in the kitchen. The kitchen is predictable. The office can be full of surprises.

  Kitchen work has a huge physical component. It’s manual labor—chopping, frying, plating, grinding, lifting, cleaning. Office work, on the other hand, is almost all mental—talking, writing, reading. Kitchen work is hot, difficult, and dirty. Office work can be only metaphorically so.

  Chefs and cooks work with perishable resources, so their decisions, movements, and sense of time are dictated by the ticking clock, and they embody a particular sense of urgency. Office workers’ deadlines are usually of a longer range, dictated more by the calendar, so we process time in a more elastic way.