Mise En Place
This French phrase means “putting everything in place”. Wikipedia defines ‘Mise En Place’ as: “It refers to the setup required before cooking, and is often used in professional kitchens to refer to organizing and arranging the ingredients (e.g., cuts of meat, relishes, sauces, par-cooked items, spices, freshly chopped vegetables, and other components) that a cook will require for the menu items that are expected to be prepared during a shift”.
Mise En Place is one of the critical steps in the culinary process followed by all chefs. There is a lot of value in it because:
- Keeping everything organized makes the process very fluid and frictionless.
- It is efficient, ensuring faster cooking time.
- It gives a better sense of control to the chef and removes distractions.
- It aids in experimenting, as chefs play with a sense of predictability and boundaries.
- Post-process clean-up is easy.
How can Mise En Place help us become more productive?
Adopting the Mise En Place approach can reap rich dividends for knowledge workers or for that matter anyone. While it might sound obvious, many of us rarely actively adopt the approach. Applying it in either work context and/or in personal context could help in eliminating a lot of friction points in the way we operate. Productivity in work context:
Productivity in work context:
- Physical setting:
- A cluttered desk is a mirror to cluttered mind. Before you start your work, clean up your desk, it gives you a sense of space and control. And keep all the things you need handy. A water bottle. A notepad. Pen. Your phone. Headphones (charged). A stressbuster ball. Post-It Notes. Everything that you need. A visual feel of all these things in front of you, primes up your mind to do great work.
- Digital setting:
- To Do list: If you are a digital note-taker, keep it ready and cleaned before you start the day. Ultimately, you need be looking at only 1 or 2 pages (in which everything is there) and shuffle between too many things. Even better, take a first stab at your to-do list before you start the day and organize your priorities. There are many frameworks for prioritization but ultimately, you know which tasks matter each day.
- Calendar: Apply Mise En Place to your calendar too – don’t let it appear too cluttered to you, giving you panic attacks. You need breathing spaces in between for both – to take breaks and also to do work that matters. Carve out those slots (I call it Focus Time).
- Email: Have a dedicated slot for emails; do not let email management occupy a continuum in your schedule.
- Other apps: Clean and review any other apps (MS Teams, etc.) that you will be using during the day. Accept the reality that we knowledge workers still need to shuffle between 3-4 apps to get stuff done. But doing a review/clean-up of everything before you dive into work, will minimize friction.
Productivity in personal context:
- The environment: Mise En Place can help you a lot in sustaining some healthy habits, especially the ones which involve processes. Keeping your environment free of other distractions will help you move naturally from one process to next, thereby building the discipline muscle. There is a concept called ‘choice architecture’ – which refers to installing a design in a way that triggers a certain decision making in the minds of audience.
- For example: If you want to drink water before you sleep and right after you wake up, make sure you keep a water bottle on your bedside or closest to your light switch. If you want to workout before you start your workday, keep your workout clothes on the chair from which you begin your office work. Enforcing such choice architecture measures will minimize the risk of losing momentum with habit.
- Other hobbies/pursuits: We often lament about not giving enough time to our other pursuits – be it sports or creative hobbies. Doing a deep check of the reasons can reveal that many times, it is not lack of time but just the way we organize things and our environment, that holds us back. Systems can have inherent friction and if we carefully redesign the environments, by eliminating distractions, we can give more time to our interests and pursuits. If you want to play cricket every Sunday but have been skipping it, keep your gear near the door on Saturday night. Even better – clean the gear on Saturday evening; it will build your resolve to get going on Sunday morning. If you want to write articles on Sundays, start your Mise En Place from Wednesday, in some micro-moves – such as writing an outline first and then adding 1 or 2 paragraphs each day till Sunday (Psst: I did exactly this, for this article). And when Sunday arrives, all you need to do is just bring it together and edit (Your Mise En Place add on will be – Coffee 🙂) . Like a Chef!
Mise En Place is a secret sauce for productivity and discipline. In many situations, keeping everything organized and ready, makes you feel confident about 70% of the job. The remaining 30% is the actual process, which you will rarely sacrifice, after covering 70% distance anyway. You do not have to look for motivation somewhere else. Your Mise En place is your motivation… and it is a mirror to your commitment… to do awesome stuff. Like a Chef!