Work Clean by Dan Charnas

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.
    Kitchen work values craft over creativity. Cooks are craftspeople,not creatives. Although chefs and cooks do create new recipes and techniques from time to time, most of the daily work involves careful replication of existing recipes and techniques. And although much of office work can be essentially craft work, office culture is suffused with both the freedom and the burden of creating new things.
    Lastly, while cooks work long hours, it’s virtually impossible for them to take their work home with them. For those of us who work for corporations or small businesses, academia or professional offices, work never seems to leave us alone.
    Given these contrasts it might seem like mise-en-place wouldn’t apply to office life, and that chefs and cooks have little to teach us. But these dissimilarities make exploration of mise-en-place in the office compelling. Precisely because the kitchen operates under intense time pressure with perishable resources, it has developed a more refined philosophy of organization. That system abhors waste in all its forms and has evolved distinctive ways of rooting it out. Precisely because the office doesn’t have to manage the efficiencies of a kitchen, the people who work in an office aren’t obliged to have
any
philosophy or system at all. Even in the best corporate environments, tolerance for waste—waste of time, space, talent, personal energy, and resources—is much higher than in kitchen culture. The way that our Jeremy works, as well-intentioned and overburdened as he is, would be unacceptable in a kitchen. He doesn’t plan enough. He doesn’t consider his schedule. He’s flustered by distractions. He leaves projects lying around half-done. He doesn’t arrange or maintain his personal space. He tunes people out. He leaves incoming communication unanswered and outgoing communication unconfirmed. He panics and rushes. He repeats his mistakes. Some people might think of the office as the province of the best and brightest, and the kitchen as the refuge of the less disciplined and less capable. And yet here’s the truth: Jeremy might have disappointed and angered his boss and colleagues, but his behaviors are quite common in the best corporations. He might develop a successful career without ever rectifying these shortcomings. In the best kitchens, he’d be fired.
    Imagine now if Jeremy had a bit of formal training in mise-en-place. Say he had spent some time in a kitchen, enough time to pick up a few good habits. It wouldn’t matter that the nature