Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  In practice, however, the difference may not be so easy to discern. How brief is that “briefly” I mention above? For me, it usually takes 10 to 15 minutes before my brief attention to a “hands-off” project becomes something that feels “hands-on.” Or here’s another way to discern “hands-on” from “hands-off”: Does the activity demand enough time to merit an entry on your schedule? Again, I find this threshold to be around 15 minutes.

  Process time includes replies, quick decisions, short personal interactions, or small errands. Process tasks are the little management “noodges” that keep projects and people around you going. Process work also includes the work of delegation.

  But when brief instruction becomes a longer education, when decision becomes analysis, when practical replies become a deeper conversation, those tasks require immersive time.

  Process time unlocks work on your behalf; delaying process tasks will delay their benefits to you and others.

  Immersive time can accord larger benefits than process time, but delaying immersive tasks doesn’t necessarily delay other people or processes on your behalf.

  Quickly discerning whether tasks require immersive or process time is crucial for being able to habitually make first moves, because process work is most effective when it happens sooner. The following quiz will help you get into that habit.

  Which of the following tasks are immersive and which are process? Ask this question of each: If I don’t act now, do I stop a process on my behalf? Do I stop other people’s work on my behalf? If the answer is yes, write “Process.” If no, write “Immersive.”

  1.Answer an e-mail asking for your approval on a brochure

  2.Answer a request for an invoice from you

  3.Come up with ideas to be pitched in a meeting happening next week

  4.Write a recommendation letter for a student

  5.Answer a friend’s invite to a dinner party

  6.Make a cold call to begin a negotiation for a partnership with another company

  7.Review an e-mail containing a one-page summary of weekly sales numbers for your department

  8.Read an attachment containing 10 pages of marketing recommendations for your department

  Answers

  1.Process—Your approval of the brochure unlocks work on your behalf. Delayed approval shuts work down.

  2.Process—Your invoice unlocks payment to you. Nothing happens on your behalf until you send it.

  3.Immersive—Brainstorming requires quiet, reflective, personal time. You don’t block any work by doing this on your own time as long as it is completed by the meeting.

  4.Immersive—Writing a thoughtful letter typically takes some dedicated creative time. What’s more, delaying writing this letter doesn’t block work on your behalf, though missing your student’s deadline may hurt your relationship.

  5.Process—Though a dinner party—and anything recreational—is by nature immersive, your decision to attend is one that can and should be made quickly to preserve the relationship and your time.

  6.Process—The time needed to make one cold call is usually brief, and it unlocks potential work. Several of these calls together signify longer-term benefits and may need an immersive session.

  7. Process—A one-sheet e-mail that can quickly be scanned and translated into one or two personal action items unlocks potential benefit.

  8.Immersive—A long read is immersive by nature. To the extent that not reading it blocks a process from happening on your behalf, it should be completed sooner rather than later.

  All the above actions have value. The purpose of this exercise is to get you to see the hidden value in some actions because they link to larger processes that are dependent on you.

  Process tasks don’t necessarily demand immediate action, but by their nature, they should be done or delegated in the short term. Immersive tasks can be delayed, but if left unscheduled for too long, they become blocks to your work and career.

  KITCHEN PRACTICE: FIND THE SEQUENCE

  Have you ever served a meal and messed up the timing, wherein one or more dishes weren’t quite ready? Started the pasta too early, so it overcooked and became soggy by the time the sauce was finished? Served breakfast, but forgot to start the coffee? The next time this happens to you, take 2 minutes at the end of the meal to write out a new sequence of actions. Commit the sequence to memory and test it. The kitchen provides a laboratory for learning how process and immersive time work together.

  HABITS: BEHAVIORS TO REPEAT

  SCHEDULE BLOCKS OF IMMERSIVE AND PROCESS TIME

  The really good stuff happens in immersive time, especially if you are in one of the creative professions. Immersive time is time to think, time to write, time to experiment, time to explore. But process time—because much of it happens with your “hands off”—actually produces more results in some cases. It’s true, we need to make and honor time for immersive work. But we shouldn’t undervalue process work. Here are tips for scheduling our work in dual time.

  ■Get in the habit of determining what tasks require immersive versus process time, as in the previous exercise. In your Action list or calendar (which we detail in Course Three of this book), denote each process task with a small “℗.” Remember, anything that needs your input or feedback on a project to keep it moving forward is process work.

  ■Begin each day with 30 minutes of scheduled process time—starting, unlocking, and unblocking the work of others.

  ■Use your process time for communication, requests, and the like. Try to constrain check-ins during immersive time.

  ■Alternate blocks of process and immersive work throughout your day. The more management responsibilities you have, the more process time you need in your day.

  ■Given your responsibilities, try to attain a perfect ratio of process to creative work. A ratio for a writer will be different from that of a department manager. Start with a 1:1 formula for creative and process time, and adjust your schedule from there.

  ■Schedule process time directly after meetings. After a long, immersive meeting, make process time to digest and set action items in motion, whether by marking them on your schedule or Action list or by delegating them.

  MAINTAINING A MOVING AND MARKING MENTALITY

  Cooks move fast. They’re able to process incoming requests and execute tasks with speed because they’ve cultivated a system for moving on tasks immediately or marking them for later.

  You can also become a moving and marking machine. Here are the habits.

  1.Carry a notebook and pen with you everywhere. Even if you carry a smartphone, you should always have an alternate, easy way to mark down tasks.

  2.Get in the habit of marking down every Action, whether an incoming task is given in person or via electronic communication.

  3.Move immediately on small process tasks (quick answers to e-mails, signing papers), especially during your process times.

  4.Mark tasks in two ways: either directly onto your schedule or—if you don’t have enough perspective on your priorities—onto your Action list for ordering and scheduling later, during your Daily Meeze. (See Third Course: Working Clean as a Way of Life for more details.)

  5.Develop a flagging system for e-mails to mark them for action and to more easily move on those action items. For many of us, e-mail is our main channel to receive incoming tasks. In the middle of a busy day, we may not have sufficient time to mark every action item that we receive via e-mail, so the e-mails themselves must serve as marks until we are able to process them by moving on them or else transferring the action item to our schedule or list. In whatever e-mail browser you use, the flagging function can help you make first moves. The rhythm, repeated several times per day, is as follows:

  a.Scan your inbox for e-mails with action items.

  b.Flag those e-mails.

  c.Archive all the e-mails in the inbox, even the flagged ones. Your e-mail inbox is now empty.

  d.Now check the flagged folder for urgent items to act on
immediately.

  e.Keep any flagged item you don’t have time to address in the flagged folder for your Daily Meeze, where you’ll either schedule the item or put it on your Action list.

  f.Unflag an e-mail once you’ve extracted the action item from it.

  6.Remember that any action item that remains in your notebook, or your flagged folder, or on a paper or digital list, you will process during your 30-minute Daily Meeze.

  With a strong Daily Meeze, you will build confidence that all your marks will always be processed later. You will also develop a sense of which tasks you can move on immediately and which seemingly “small” tasks are actually big ones in disguise. You will become a master mover and marker!

  The present has incalculably more value than the future. Starting is, in effect, a shortcut.

  A chef’s reprise: No shortcuts

  By the time Eden opened his first restaurant, Shorty’s 32, the idea of making first moves had become instinctive—as it remains for him now at the reincarnation of August on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  An order comes in—bam!—Eden’s hand slaps a pan onto the stove by reflex. He doesn’t think, doesn’t realize it’s happening. Every 2 seconds now saves him a minute later. Every pan down is the first move in a series of moves that need to happen to complete a dish. Without the first move, none of the other moves can happen. Eden tries to make as many first moves as he can. When he goes down to the storeroom, he returns with armfuls of ingredients and tools he knows he’ll need for his mise-en-place, that he knows his other cooks will need. The newer members of the kitchen look at their chef like he’s crazy.

  But Eden knows: Do it now, don’t wait for later. Now I’m calm and steady and energetic; later I’m stressed and jittery and exhausted. Now I’m moving perfectly, which saves me time; later I’m making mistakes, which cost me time. One easy shortcut now can force me into any number of bad shortcuts later. In service Eden urges his cooks to make the first moves, as his chef reminded him to do, and as his chef’s chef did—Guys . . . pans down!—a lesson about time handed down through time.

  Recipe for Success

  Commit to using time to your benefit. Start now.

  THE FIFTH INGREDIENT

  FINISHING ACTIONS

  A chef’s story: The delivery woman

  Chef Charlene Johnson-Hadley was buried in mushrooms, eight cases in all. Hundreds upon hundreds of musky expressions of earth covered every available work surface around her. Charlene needed to examine and sort each of them, tossing the unusable ones and arranging the rest on sheet trays. Then she’d have to plunge batches of them into cold water, removing loose soil, twigs, and other impurities—another painstaking task. After that, they’d need to be sliced and roasted. The mountain of mushrooms would reduce to almost nothing—caramelizing, crisping, sweetening, losing their water and most of their mass—ending up as tasty slices in the mushroom soup devoured by the lunch guests at Chef Johnson-Hadley’s restaurant, American Table in New York City.

  Charlene couldn’t focus. Her mind leapt to the other projects she needed to accomplish that day. There was a pecan tart. There were sherbets to make. A couple of times Charlene caught herself walking away from her station to start something else—the act was completely involuntary—but turned herself around before she got too far.

  “Stop, Charlene,” the chef said aloud. “No, you need to finish sorting these . . . ”

  Those mushrooms. Her subconscious was doing anything it could to get her away from them. She talked herself through the task, like her chef would have talked her through it, like her mother would have.

  When the younger Charlene Johnson announced to her mother Hyacinth—a Jamaican immigrant with a master’s in education—that she didn’t want to finish college, she worried. After the death of a grandmother with whom she was particularly close, Charlene’s pursuit of a psychology degree had left her feeling increasingly empty. She told Hyacinth that she wanted to leave academia and learn how to make pastry, and braced for the worst. Instead, her mother gave Charlene her best: “Why limit yourself? Get a culinary degree. That way, you’ll get cooking as well as baking.”

  After attending the French Culinary Institute, Charlene moved through jobs of escalating responsibility: working with Francois Payard at his famous bistro and patisserie on New York’s Upper East Side, rising from line cook to sous-chef at designer Nicole Farhi’s restaurant, and taking the top chef’s job at Farhi’s 202 Cafe in Chelsea. But in late 2010, she saw that the former chef of Aquavit, Marcus Samuelsson, was opening a new upscale, concept restaurant in Harlem—a neighborhood whose most famous culinary attraction until that point had been the down-home soul food restaurant Sylvia’s. Samuelsson, an Ethiopian raised in Sweden by adoptive parents, climbed out of some of the best kitchens of Europe into New York City. He was now making an equally improbable leap on behalf of his adopted locale: to bring fine dining uptown in a way that honored Harlem’s particular cultural and racial legacy. Charlene got herself an interview and a chance to “trail” in the kitchen, meaning she could observe and have the chefs observe her, too. She had never seen so many chefs of color in a high-end kitchen. Even though she was already a full-fledged chef, she took a line cook job at the new restaurant just to be a part of Samuelsson’s enterprise. He named it Red Rooster, after a speakeasy from Harlem’s Renaissance period in the early 20th century.

  Through the opening in 2011 and beyond, Samuelsson watched Charlene and came to know her as calm, dependable, and disciplined. One evening in the winter of 2012, about a year after she began working at Red Rooster, she felt a hand on her arm. It was Chef.

  “Come with me,” Samuelsson ordered.

  Oh God, what did I do? Charlene wondered.

  In a secluded corner of the kitchen Samuelsson told her, “I want you to know that I’ve noticed all of your work. I’ve got some things happening this year, and I want you to be a part of it. I just want you to prepare yourself.”

  Samuelsson made Charlene the executive chef of his restaurant in the sleek new home of the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center. The name itself was a mouthful: American Table Cafe and Bar by Marcus Samuelsson. And that job came with a catch: The kitchen was located in another building across the street, and finished food would have to be carted back and reheated for service. The operation would call on all of Charlene Johnson-Hadley’s mental and physical mise-en-place.

  After the opening, one food critic visited twice and enjoyed his meals before discovering that American Table was a restaurant without a kitchen on premises, a feat that he credited to “the menu created by Samuelsson and his fellow Swede-in-crime Nils Norén.”

  Meanwhile, in the bowels of Lincoln Center, the uncredited chef Charlene Johnson-Hadley ran the engine that made American Table go. Being chef today meant clawing her way out of this pile of mushrooms. She couldn’t do it if she didn’t stand still and deliver.

  A half-hour later she was still coaching herself: “Yes, now we need to plunge these.”

  Even after years in the business honing her discipline, she found this was the hardest part of the gig, but one of the most crucial: maintaining a finishing mentality. It was too easy to give in to fatigue and frustration. It was too easy to stop or pause a project as the finish line came into view with a deluded confidence that it could be completed later. She knew that if she indulged her restlessness—even with the intention to get another project started—she would end up throwing her entire day off. If she didn’t start the mushrooms, complete them; start the short ribs, complete them; start the pecan tarts, complete them; none of them would have gotten done. Charlene Johnson-Hadley respected the iron law of the kitchen: A dish that is 90 percent finished has the same worth as a dish that is zero percent finished.

  WHAT CHEFS DO, WHAT CHEFS KNOW

  Chefs deliver

  Just as chefs have a philosophy about starting, they have a doctrine of finishing that springs from the distinctive character of their work.

 
The very nature of the kitchen’s product demands that chefs develop a finishing mentality. Dishes, for the most part, are all-or-nothing. A chef cannot serve a steak au poivre without the peppercorn sauce, at least not if she expects to keep customers who know the difference. A menu cannot promise fries on the side and fail to deliver them. And let’s presume, just for the sake of argument, that the customer isn’t so discerning. The customer can’t be served at all unless the cook puts a plate in the pass. A bunch of dishes in various stages of completion are useless until at least one of them is finished. Ninety percent done is still zero percent done from the perspective of the customer. So a cook must develop a delivery mind-set.

  Chefs avoid the hidden costs of stopping

  The finishing imperative comes from the nature of kitchen production—churning out massive quantities of high-quality food. Finishing all that food requires a lot of repeated motion. The economy of repeated motion is the principle on which the industrial assembly line is built. Individual workers can get more work accomplished, and faster, if they do the same action or job repeatedly. If a worker stops, the whole line stops. We can measure the cost of the stoppage not only in minutes lost during a pause, but also in minutes spent ramping up production again. Think of someone like Chef Johnson-Hadley as an assembly line unto herself. She has a number of jobs to do. But she knows she will be more efficient if she does one job at a time—to aggregate alike actions—than if she stops and does something else, skipping from one action to another. Momentum and aggregation are key rationales for continuing with an action until it is done.

  Chefs finish to clear workspace and headspace