Work Clean (18 page)
Authors: Dan Charnas
One day Jean-Georges walked past Sosa's station right before
service. While everyone else scurried, there was Angelo Sosa, serene, polishing a set of copper pots. Jean-Georges's mouth twisted into a smile.
“Okay, Chef,” Vongerichten said, and walked away.
Chefs don't run
Chefs have a paradoxical relationship to time. Every day they race the clock, but at other times they seem to be able to stop it. Time is rigid until it's malleable, finite until it's infinite. Chefs know some moments count more than others. And they know that one's perception of time has a lot to do with one's relationship to space. Those concepts of time and space merge in the almost quantum notion of
slowing down to speed up.
Angelo Sosa didn't learn that principle until well after he had left the CIA. Melissa Gray began learning it while she was still there, dashing around the kitchen of her High-Quantity Food Production class while Chef David McCue watched.
Finally he spoke: “Chefs never run.”
Gray stopped and looked at him.
“Do you ever see any of the chefs here run?” he asked her.
Gray thought for a moment. In her 4 years, not once.
“Chefs never run because they're always in the right place at the right time,” he said.
The implication was clear: If you're running, it's because you aren't prepared. If you're running, you're wasting energy. If you're running, you're not thinking. If you're running, you're acting like a
cook.
Many professional chefs wear the title of “cook” with humble pride and abhor the honorific “chef”âwhich Gray herself believes is a title earned by mastery and not by declaration or diploma. But among Gray's classmates, “cook” was a shame word, as in the insult, “Stop acting like a cook!” At the CIA the difference between “chef” and “cook” measured a culinary student's mastery of phys
ical and mental mise-en-place:
Chefs plan, cooks don't. Chefs see the whole kitchen, cooks zone in on their own station. Chefs move calmly and smoothly, cooks rush.
Gray remembered what her skills instructor, Rudy Speckamp, counseled before her first big practical exam, the test that determines whether students can move forward.
“
Pretend
that you are calm,” he said.
The basic concept is this: The natural human tendency in the face of imminent deadline is to rush or panic. Don't rush; when you rush, your movements become sloppy. Don't panic; when you panic, you forget things. When you find yourself rushing or panicking or both, just stop. Breathe. If your anxiety compels you to move, then clean. The act of cleaning, of wiping down your station, will force you to take some breaths. Look around you. Think about where you are and where you need to be. Think of the next step to get you there and take that step, slowly.
Chef Sam Henderson recalls a panic in her early days at wd-50. The restaurant had just initiated its first lunch service, and Dufresne put everyone in the weeds. The kitchen crew worked two shifts. “We were all tired and grumpy,” Henderson remembers. Distracted by some family problems, she went to the farmers' market to pick up strawberries and got the wrong ones. Then she had to create an
amuse-bouche,
and nothing she tried was working. The clock ticked. In her rush to cook family meal for the entire staff, she burned the cauliflower she intended to use. With almost no time left, Henderson broke down and ran outside. A minute or two later, Dufresne appeared by her sideâ“Sammie, what's wrong?”âalerted by her fellow cook J.J. Basil. “Let's focus,” he said. “I'll help you with family meal. We'll sort through the
amuse
together.” Dufresne deconstructed her tasks, and he guided her through them. They made it through service just fine.
Sometimes it's the panic about the work that's in your way, not the work itself.
Slowing down does two important things for a cook. It steadies the body, allowing for smoother, more precise movements. And it helps the mind break down a series of movements into their constituent parts. Those two elements give slowing down its ultimate value:
Slowness is the only way a cook can access quality velocity.
The wiring of our brain makes this so.
All human movement and thought result from neuronsâour brain cellsâcommunicating in synchrony with each other. That communication happens through physical pathways called axons, which signal other neurons, and dendrites, which receive those signals. The brain creates a substance called myelin that quickens that transmission. The more a particular connection “fires,” the more myelin “wires” that connection by adhering to the firing axon. This process, called myelinization, is the physiological result of repeated motion, repeated thought, repeated practice. It is how we learn and how we achieve mastery.
Here's the interesting part: Myelinization “wires” the
quality
of our movement, thought, and practice. So if you're repeating an action sloppily, that sloppiness will be what myelinization preserves. And if you're repeating an action precisely, that precision will be what myelinization enshrines instead. Adding speed to the “precise” movement may compromise that precision, but adding speed to the “sloppy” movement won't make that movement any more precise. In the duality between speed and precision, precision must always precede speed, like that adage attributed to football titan Vince Lombardi: “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”
Chefs believe that the state of their physical space not only has an effect on their minds, but on their perception of time. If your station is dirty, your day
itself
becomes compressed. If your station is clean, your day springs open. If you're worried about time, that
worry will show up in your physical space. If you're calm about time, your workspace will be clear.
Chefs are practical people. But when they talk about the principles of mise-en-place, they often wax metaphysical. Remember Chef LiPuma? When he talks about the benefits of planning, he invokes peace: “You want to greet the day.” When he holds forth on the wages of working clean, he alludes to life force: “I breathe beautifully and cook fantastic.”
Chefs need every second they can get. But they don't wonder, as we do, whether planning and organizing take valuable time away from their real work. They
know
the wisdom of taking a moment to clear their spaces. They
know
how to save time and make time. Slowing down and moving smoothly, for chefs, is a behavior of the highest order.
When we are “in the shit” of our own life, with a deadline looming, we can't imagine slowing down. I find it comforting to know that chefs deal with this impulse daily. Are they afraid of failure? Of course. Are they fighting the clock? Absolutely. But the most seasoned among them know that there's a big difference between hustling and rushing, between a sense of urgency and panicking. They calm their minds and extend time by moving their bodies smoothly, and cover the distance to the finish line by moving them steadily. They
work clean
with their emotions.
When we talk about slowing down, we've referred here in large part to physical movementâhow we move our legs and arms and hands and fingers. But slowing down can also refer to the cognitiveâhow we thinkâand also interpersonal and theoretical realmsâhow we engage a new project, how we embark on a new relationship, how we invest money and resources.
Outside the kitchen, we can practice and integrate the principle of slowing down to speed up in all its dimensions: physical, mental, and social.
SLOW AND STEADY MOVEMENTS
Before we can master the swift, we must master the steady, and to master the steady, we must consciously reduce our speed. Here are some useful exercises to master the art of slowing down.
â
When you feel the urge to physically rush,
elongate your movements
instead of quickening your pace. When you are moving your legs, don't runâjust
widen
your stride. When you are moving your arms, imagine yourself gracefully extending them as a dancer would.
â
Practice
interval breaths:
Get a stopwatch or an app that has an interval timer. Select a task that you do with regularity. For 5 minutes, every 60 seconds, stop what you are doing and take one full and deep breath.
â
Whether on the phone or face-to-face, conversation can often induce the kind of impatience that causes us to be more brusque with other people than we'd like. This is a good opportunity to exercise your own speed control. When you hear yourself overtalking or interrupting someone, just begin to
talk slower.
Chances are it will have a calming effect on you, force your partner to pay attention, and actually let you wrap up the conversation in a way that is genuine, polite, and honest.
â
In times of stress our thinking can get hasty. The next time you find your mind spinning, take a piece of paper and begin to
write down thoughts
as they occur. This “offloading” will slow you down, and you may end up with a “mind map” in front of you that helps you stay calm, gives you some ideas for action, and perhaps helps you solve your problem.
Select one task that you tend to rushâor drag yourself through, or dread, or bungle in some wayâand break it down into its component parts.
1.
Perform the action once.
Let's say it's completing a “sales deck” or some other kind of common visual business presentation. Time it from start to finish.
2.
Note the
time you took
to complete it and also jot down the
resistance you encountered
while making it: Trouble locating images or data, perhaps? Too much time spent formatting?
3.
Then
list out the steps
for the actionâbeing neither too granular nor too broad. Shoot for a number between 5 and 10 steps. Break down the action into discrete sub-actions that stand on their own. So for the sales deck example, it may end up being something like: (a) collect data; (b) write outline; (c) collect images; (d) create the slides; (e) tweak and finish presentation for delivery. Just looking at a task broken down in this way can tell you a lot. Maybe you spend way too much time trying to collect data. Perhaps then you need to allot more time for that step or delegate that work in advance to allow you to focus on other steps. Maybe formatting the slides is a problem because you haven't been able to take the time to create a style template that would make your workflow go much faster.
4.
Where your breakdown tells you to create a process, fix a problem, or train yourself,
pause or slow down
by scheduling some time for that work.
The point of this exercise is to slow down a nonconscious process by consciously analyzing it so that, with practice, you can streamline it and make it faster. This exercise works like practice
on a musical instrument. New York University professor and musicologist Jeff Peretz puts it this way: “For a particularly difficult piece, I tell my students to break the big task into microtasksâto repeat those smaller passages very slowly. Then when they get those microtasks down, they can move their fingers faster. Then you link all those microtasks together and work on the transitions. But you could never have done that long piece so well without breaking it down first.”
Taking the time to slow down and analyze a complex taskâeven though it may feel like a waste of time and a pain in the ass while you are doing the analysisâwill save you time in the long term.
Body calms mind, and for many chefs, a calm body and mind also make for better food. For one meal try making all your moves extra slow, steady, and smooth. Note the effect it has on your performance as a cook, on your food, your mood, and that of your diners.
PROCRASTINATION KILLER
Slowing down to speed up gives us power over procrastination.
Yvette, an accountant, has a list of spreadsheets to prepare for her company's yearly audit. She has so much work to do that she begins to feel restless after simply opening and looking at the first document. So she clicks over to her Internet browser, to her e-mailâwhatever it takes to not feel the weight of that work pressing on her.
Slowing down to speed up suggests another way to be in this moment. When Yvette feels like stopping, instead of distracting herself, she can just make her moves
very slow.
She can type slowlyâone key at a time. If she needs to gather files, she moves
very slowly in getting these, smoothly, like a ballet. When she calls someone for information, she dials lazily, even making her own voice relaxed. She opens each motion up. She breathes through each little thing. She still hates it, but now her tasks become more like a game or a moving meditation. The work is still getting done, albeit at a snail's pace, but the difference is this: (1) She hasn't given up her control, which is what she'd do if she decided to start browsing the Web; (2) She still has forward momentum, if languid; (3) She gives herself more time to think and be mindful of each action, which is the opposite of freaking out or shutting down in the face of an avalanche of work; and (4) She breaks down her actions into their constituent parts, which, as we did in the above exercise, is a time-tested method of getting large projects done, but
not
normally how we relate to smaller, more mundane activities like writing an e-mail or preparing for a meeting. But even tasks that are small in terms of labor and time can loom large for us, so using the same breakdown tools for small tasks can penetrate our resistance.
The more the resistance, the slower you move. But don't disengage. You can use this slow-but-don't-stop technique for just about anything that you don't want to do: getting out of bed in the morning (move left leg, move right leg, shift body, feet on floor), washing the dishes (move plate, turn faucet on, soak plate, grab sponge, move hand in a circular motion).
Each of us has triggers that cause us to panic in work or personal situations. If you find yourself in the throes of a crisis that tends to recur, use a variation of the checklist technique we suggested in
The Second Ingredient: Arranging Spaces, Perfecting Movements
.
Here's an example: Whenever Fred makes a mistake that annoys his boss, Fred falls apart. His hands shake for the rest of the day, and he forgets things and makes additional mistakes, which makes
everything worse. After a few hours, a friend takes Fred aside and calms him down. Why not enshrine that knowledge instead in a little crisis checklist Fred can keep at his workstation?
When the boss yells:
1.
Listen to the boss and mirror her complaint.
2.
Do not apologize or defend; the boss hates apologies and excuses. She will just say, “Get it done.” So the only thing to say is “I will get it done.”
3.
Calm your body! No matter how urgent the problem, go to a quiet place for 2 minutes and breathe. Touch your toes and stand up and stretch 10 times. Go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face.
4.
Make a quick list of steps to remedy the situation. Determine how long those steps will take.
5.
If pressed for time, don't forget to delegate or request help. Let your crew and your colleagues help you!
6.
When the task is done, let the boss know. Say: “I fixed it.”
7.
If the task is not yet complete, before the end of the day, give the boss a status report and offer a delivery time estimate.
The checklist response can be effective for relationships at work or home. For example, if certain situations (a boss yelling, a child forgetting her chores) cause you to lose emotional control, you can make yourself a crisis checklist of reminders (breathe, know that it's not the end of the world, ask calmly for what you need, etc.), something to grab in those situations to reclaim some control.
Think that referring to a checklist in an emotional situation is a ridiculous idea? Then think about this: Pilots train to overcome their emotions when faced with situations much more dire. When an airplane is in trouble, the
first
thing a pilot grabs is his checklist, because pilots know that emotion can cause all kinds of counterproductive reactions and mistakes that could endanger the flight.
The aviation checklist industry exists to save lives in this manner. And when the worst happens, that industry's employees pore over the flight data recorders to see if they can change processes to save lives in the future.
It's not surprising, then, that some business literature refers to this kind of learning from failure as “black box thinking.”
In times of stress or panic, clean your workstationâyour desk and/ or your computerâso that your visual field is clear. Put things where they belong. Close apps. Keep your hands moving, slow, slower. Now take another breath and look around. Think about the next thing you need to do. Chain your tasks together, chain your movements together. Now resume, slowly, steadily, smoothly. Keep breathing beautifully.