Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  Chefs train and restrain their movements

  Pretty as it might look, the point of arranging spaces is not beauty, but to allow movements to be free, small, rhythmic, and most important, automatic. Repeated often enough, a movement will train our brains in a process called automaticity that allows us to execute that movement without consciously thinking about it. Chefs sometimes call this phenomenon muscle memory, but muscles don’t actually remember anything. What’s actually happening is that the part of the brain that thinks about what we’re doing, the prefrontal cortex, cedes control to the part of the brain that governs nonconscious reactions, the basal ganglia.

  Movements in the kitchen run from simple procedures like cutting vegetables, to complex processes like multistep recipes, and then to the ballet of an entire service period. Each of these levels engenders its own choreography, as Michael Gibney calls it in his book, Sous Chef.

  (A) Left hand picks up pear

  (B) Right hand peels pear

  (C) Left hand places pear in acidulated water

  . . . and repeat. The specificity of the choreography is important. You can’t cut a pear a different way each time and expect a similar result, nor can you expect to ever gain speed.

  The choreography of the entire workflow must support the choreography of the task. In many cases, the flow will move across the cutting board, the right-handed example being: Unprocessed ingredients move in from the left side of the cutting board, cutting happens in the center, and processed ingredients move to the right. Knife and towel go back to their original places when the task is done.

  But depending on the size and nature of the ingredient, this workflow may change. “One’s physical orientation during a given task is the product of the task itself,” Gibney says. “If I were sectioning lemons, I might have a tipped-over container of lemons to the north of my cutting board, the storage container to my left, and the refuse receptacle to my right.” In this case—similar to the pear example above—the nondominant left hand holding the fruit will also move the fruit, once processed, to the left instead of the right, to avoid another inefficient move that chefs abhor: hands crossing over the body’s central axis.

  “You’ll see somebody who’s right-handed peeling a carrot and reaching across themselves and putting it in a container on the left,” Chef Alfred Portale says. Sometimes Portale not only arranges his stations, but arranges his cooks: “They’re trying to cut something square and they’re standing at an angle, or their cutting board is at an angle. I’ll say: ‘What are you doing? You’ve got to square your whole body up if you want to cut a perfect dice.’”

  “Nobody is naturally disposed to move this way,” Gibney says. “You don’t often think, ‘I’m going to put my groceries away in the most efficient way possible today. Let’s start with the fridge open, squat down, bag on the ground in front of me, and pull items out shelf by shelf to minimize excess movements.’ Unless, of course, you’re a chef.”

  Indeed, chefs and cooks spend their careers rehearsing and refining their “moves,” and they regard good moves in other cooks as basketball players might revere the hook shot of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

  Every cook in some way makes an internal map of his or her movements. It took more than a decade for Jarobi White to conceptualize what he calls his Magic Triangle.

  The triangle itself is an ergonomic shape, matching how we’re built: When planted, our attention can be on our front and sides, but not behind us. Sometimes a triangle is as simple as Gibney’s cutting board workflow: input, work, output. And a circle within the triangle enables our primary focus to change with minimal movement, allowing for a more complex workflow like Jarobi’s: action, beginning/finishing, input/output. The Magic Triangle is the holistic assembly line of any craftsperson, a path in and out of any task.

  Chefs greet space

  When chefs like Mario Batali, Masaharu Morimoto, and Eric Ripert need to create a new kitchen from scratch, they call Jimi Yui.

  Yui (pronounced “You-eee”) isn’t a chef, but he grew up in a restaurant. His parents ran The Guest House, serving gourmet Peking-style Chinese meals in the Roppongi district of Tokyo, where Yui developed a visceral familiarity with the rhythms of a kitchen. So when Yui takes on a new project, oftentimes he will go to an existing kitchen run by that chef, watch how cooks move, and listen to what they’re saying and doing. How many burners does a particular station need? How many people need to fit there? What are the most common actions on those stations and movements around the room?

  When Yui walks into a new space, he watches and listens to the emptiness.

  “You embrace it,” Yui says. “You try to make the most of what it can do for you, or you realize that the space doesn’t want to be what you want it to be.” Once, Yui entered a vacant space for a new Gray Kunz restaurant on New York’s Columbus Circle and found it shaped like a flattened triangle. The most logical place for the kitchen—where the space itself wanted that kitchen to be—was against the wall of gorgeous windows looking out on Central Park, where the most desirable dining tables would normally be. Yui put the kitchen by the windows.

  “I believe in trying to solve puzzles, but in a way that doesn’t fight the space,” Yui says. “Fighting space is a really bad thing.”

  In the same way that chefs try to be honest with time—to greet the day—Yui strives to be honest with space.

  Yui’s designs also follow another principle: Make the kitchen and the spaces within it as small as possible. This is a counterintuitive notion to many Americans for whom the holy grail is a spacious kitchen, with their stove, refrigerator, and sink set up in a perfect triangle—because a triangle, they’ve heard, is efficient.

  “It’s not efficient if you have 10 to 12 feet of space between each of those points,” Yui says. “I hate those kitchens.”

  Instead, Yui tries to make the points on his triangles much smaller.

  “I try to do things so that you don’t have to take a step,” he says. “We make things as small as we can make them.”

  How small? “Until you can’t physically fit all the stuff and people that you need in order to work. Until the point of no return where you know you’re gonna die.”

  Chefs know they don’t need a lot of space because they are smart about why and how they use it.

  Chefs use all movements

  Inside Jarobi’s Magic Triangle, he’s not just moving one arm, he’s moving both simultaneously. While his left hand shakes a pan, his right hand grabs onions from his mise. When he reaches for plates, it’s two at a time, not one at a time because, well, he’s got two hands. It’s what Chef Fritz Sonnenschmidt, dean emeritus of the CIA, calls “using both sides of your body. Your left and your right side have to become one.”

  Balanced movement is a key part of ergonomic movement. It’s something I realized at home after spending a lot of late nights in professional kitchens. One bleary-eyed morning, I leaned on the countertop with my left hand as I unloaded the dishwasher with the right; grabbed one plate, put it on the counter; grabbed another, put it on the counter; grabbed another, etc. What I wouldn’t give for a helping hand, I thought. I looked dumbly at my left hand, still propped against the countertop. With that, I drafted Lefty into service. Now I’m emptying the dishwasher in half the time. Life lesson learned: Use both hands. But I’m also still emptying the dishwasher one rack at a time: top one first, then the bottom. To do that, I’m crisscrossing the kitchen constantly: put glasses over here, cross the dishwasher, put cutlery over there, cross the dishwasher. Lefty said: Wouldn’t it be better to stand on one side of the dishwasher, pull out all the things that go on that side, and then stand on the other side and do the same? Another lesson learned: Use both sides of a space.

  Chefs don’t only use both sides of their bodies, they use both sides of their motions. If you’re headed to the dishwasher’s station to drop off dirty pans, use the opportunity to stop in the walk-in refrigerator nearby to replenish your supply of proteins or veg
etables or sauces. If you’re headed toward the pantry to pick up onions, take trash with you on the way there. Good servers and food runners excel at this practice: Take a plate of food out, bring a dirty plate back. Jarobi White calls this “hands in, hands out.”

  Every day, chefs cultivate the use of both sides of the body, both sides of a space, and both sides of a motion.

  Chefs chain tasks

  Planning is thinking before moving. Movement is that thought embodied. But the culmination of perfected motion in the kitchen is the cook’s ability to intertwine planning and movement: thinking while moving. We might call it dynamic planning, but some cooks refer to it as task chaining or task stacking.

  While cooks are handling task A, their minds envision task B. As a result, as they finish task A, their body begins to move toward task B. While they are on task B, they think about task C. An apt metaphor for this would be the monkey bars at a playground, where you must grab onto the next rung before releasing the current one.

  Michael Gibney writes about this phenomenon in Sous Chef: “Like a skilled billiards player, you begin anticipating your next move and the one after that, so that when one task is done, you don’t waste time trying to figure out what follows. You move seamlessly between activities, shaving precious seconds off the overall time it takes to complete your mise-en-place.”

  CIA baking graduate Arbil Lopez explains task chaining this way: “You’re always thinking, ‘What am I doing next? I’m mixing now. When I take this off the mixer, I have to pipe it. When it goes in the oven for 45 minutes, I can put something else on the mixer. While that’s on the mixer, I can boil syrup for this other thing.’ You have fewer moments of, ‘Umm, what am I doing?’”

  The crucial, seconds-saving elimination of lag time between actions is what Dwayne LiPuma calls flow: an internalization of the sequence and order of tasks, derived from an active mind that is always thinking one or two steps ahead. Cooks develop a nose for tasks that can be done simultaneously, chained together, or stacked within each other. Over time, they make mental maps of those routines.

  Making every movement count is an unattainable ideal. Still, chefs and cooks stretch toward it every day—not just to save time, but to save their minds. If a cook can use one movement to get two things done, that’s one less thing to worry about, which in turn makes her movements more focused and less fraught. It also turns mise-en-place into a game of sorts, a competitive sport wherein a chef plays against herself.

  “Even when I’m at home, I’m always thinking,” says Lopez. Cleaning her apartment has become a feat of task chaining and stacking. She puts the laundry in the machine and is already thinking about grabbing the mop as she shuts the door. “You end up saving so much time,” she says.

  OUT OF THE KITCHEN

  We arrange spaces—and perfect movements within those spaces—to remove resistance. The less friction we have in our work, the easier it is to do, the more we can do, and the quicker we can do it; and thus the more physical and mental energies we can preserve for other things. We want the absence of friction, or as Dwayne LiPuma says, to move through our work “like oil on glass.”

  In the kitchen, chefs and cooks work clean with space and movement because even a slight amount of friction—not knowing where an ingredient or tool is—will slow them down, physically and mentally, and undermine their ability to be excellent. Arranging spaces for economy of motion pays extra dividends in the kitchen because most motions in the kitchen are repetitive. But the behavior can be just as helpful in our homes and at our workspaces, too.

  Our offices may not have the physical demands of the professional kitchen, nor quite the degree of repetitive motion, nor the moment-to-moment need to save and shave time. But we all feel the psychological and physiological results of disorganization; we’ve all lost minutes, even hours, of our time looking for tools or resources, or re-creating lost work. Our keyboards and screens require all manner of repetitive, automatized movements; and we all suffer from time wasted by failing to apply our mental capacity to our daily movements, and to the execution of complex processes, which are also movements on a macro level. A project that ends up sidetracking managers and workers for days or weeks or longer is just one big, bad wasted move to be looked at with the same skeptical eye.

  In the office world, we not only devalue space and motion, we hardly think about them at all. Mise-en-place encourages us to look at the human, physical side of work—even virtual, digital work—and to apply those same concepts of eliminating resistance to higher orders of motion and process.

  We arrange spaces to remove resistance.

  EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN

  AUDIT YOUR SPACES AND MOVES

  In this exercise we’re going to inventory friction points in your physical and virtual spaces.

  Step One. List three tasks that you find difficult or resist doing.

  1.One physical task at home or work (for example: taking out the trash, putting project materials away)

  2.One digital task on a digital device (for example: answering e-mails, backing up the computer)

  3.One complex process or errand at or between home and work (for example: prepping to teach a class, taking stuff to cleaners)

  Step Two. For each of those tasks, list one action you can take to decrease that resistance. Some suggestions:

  1.For difficult physical tasks, look for ways to arrange your space to make the motion easier. For example: If reaching the file cabinet is a problem, try positioning your desk another way or purchasing moveable file boxes or bins to get your “desk piles” off your desk but keep them together and available. Think also about ways to move more efficiently, using both sides of your body, both sides of a space, and both sides of a motion.

  2.For difficult digital tasks, look for ways to use software to automate tasks (see “Digital Declutter, Software Shortcuts”) and consider purchasing new hardware and software to smooth your way.

  3.For complex processes (for example, onboarding a new client or vendor, editing a piece of work), pinpoint the steps in the process where you get hung up. Then make a checklist to guide you through those steps (see “Checklists: Recipes for Processes”).

  4.For difficult errands, consider a larger-scale version of balanced motion. For example, a run to the cleaners needs to be paired with another motion on a regular basis to make both more efficient.

  Ultimately you want to create workflows for each of the important tasks or processes you do. Michael Gibney describes what happens in the kitchen if this choreography is not set up before the task begins: “Occasionally you’ll see this beautiful moment of frustration on a cook’s face when she’s doing something and—‘ugh!’— rearranges something on her station really quickly. It’s embarrassing for the cook and super brief, but you realize that 3 minutes into doing this task she realized, ‘Oh, shit, I’m not doing this the right way. I’m not working as efficiently as possible.’”

  DRAW AND BUILD YOUR WORKSTATION

  Whether building a new kitchen or creating a new dish, the first action many chefs take isn’t making a list, but drawing a picture.

  In this exercise you will draw your own perfect workspace, and yourself within it.

  Step One. Get a sheet of paper and a pen or marker. Set a timer for no more than 5 minutes.

  Step Two. Begin your drawing with yourself. Are you standing? In a chair? Draw a circle around yourself.

  Step Three. Begin placing work objects around you. Some guidance:

  ■In front of you. The thing(s) you need to see and touch the most. In some cases this might be a computer or laptop, but for others it might be a drafting easel or an empty space for books and papers. Control devices like keyboards go here.

  ■On the side of your dominant hand. Control devices, mobile devices, phones, paper, stapler, tape, pens.

  ■On the side of your nondominant hand. Resources, files, fasteners, references, inboxes/outboxes. The principle behind this, says Jimi Yui, is to limit “cr
ossover,” i.e., your hands crossing your body.

  Step Four. Stop when the timer goes off. Now look at your current workspace. Take note of everything that you didn’t draw. Write those items down. Ask: Why are they there? Sometimes stuff just stays on our desks because we neglect to move it, or we want to use it as a placeholder, or it has some sentimental value. Now think about using height—a shelf—to take less essential items out of your immediate field of view but within arm’s reach.

  After this exercise make a list of items to gather or purchase to create this workspace. Invest whatever time and money you can spare in setting up your workstation as ergonomically as possible: the right desk, the right chair, the right tools. Are big, L-shaped desks with plenty of drawers better? Not necessarily. Small, as we’ve seen, is often better. Are fancy ergonomic chairs good for you? Sure. But sitting upright at the edge of a metal folding chair might be just as healthy for your back. And if you have a computer, should you have a pull-out tray to keep the keyboard parallel to your forearms, and a screen at eye level? Probably.

  Consider removing anything you didn’t draw in your picture; you don’t have to trash it, but try your workstation in its most spare, uncluttered form for a week and see how it feels.

  KITCHEN PRACTICE: TASK CHAINING

  Whether you call it task chaining, task stacking, or flow, being able to conceive and envision your next move while making your current one can save time and turn even drudge work into a moving meditation.

  One of the ways I practice both task chaining and balanced movement together is in the kitchen. For example, when I make a fried egg, my first action is to reach up and grab a pan. But while my right hand is reaching for the pan, my left is turning the gas knob on my stove. While I’m bringing that pan to the heat, my mind is already thinking “butter and eggs,” so there isn’t any hesitation between steps. My head has already swiveled and my feet are moving toward the refrigerator. And I know my left hand will grab the butter while my right hand grabs the eggs. As I move back toward the stove, I shut the door with my foot, and my mind is already thinking about grabbing a butter knife from the drawer and a bowl from the cupboard once my ingredients are set down.