Work Clean (27 page)
Authors: Dan Charnas
This balanced life is the true meaning of
working clean.
In these pages,
clean
doesn't mean neat and tidy. And what great chefs mean by working clean is not necessarily a spotless, sterile environment nor a life without spontaneity. Rather, the meaning of
clean
is conscious, ordered, prepared, persistent, honest, honorable; the opposite of unconscious, passive, unprepared, lazy, ignorant, dishonest, dishonorable. So wherever mess serves our awareness, our sense of things being right, our fullness, our alignment with reality, and our ability to honor ourselves, our family, our work, and our worldâthen even being messy is working clean.
Anything else is just a waste.
Total utilization doesn't ask us to milk
every
inch of space, trim
every
motion, use
every
moment of time and
every
resource for maximum productivity and efficiency. But working clean with resources does mean living a life where you properly value those things.
Get your most important spaces in order because space is precious. Practice and perfect the motions that make sense to refine because your energy is precious. Honor time because you're not getting any more of it. Use your resources wisely because ultimately we all must share them. And treat each other with care.
What's the opposite of total utilization? We're living in it, at work and in the world. Societies and nations don't plan. We chew up land and leave other spaces wasted. We don't start important things and leave others unfinished. We rush. We don't see and hear things. We don't communicate. We're okay with mediocre. So much of what we do is halfway. So much of our attention is divided. We treat people as if they are worthless. In the face of our human failings, should we give up? No, the entire history of mankind is the dynamic between order and disorder. Total utilization challenges us to be alive without becoming an affliction to the world and each other. The goal of total utilization and mise-en-place is that you not waste life: yours or the planet's.
At the end of our trail we see how chefs nourish with food and with wisdom, teaching their own and teaching the world.
Chefs restore. We, their students, can, too.
BETTER
UTILIZATION EXERCISE
Before you attempt
total
utilization, why not try
more
utilization? Here's an exercise.
What is your most important workspace?
If it's your computer, for example, organize it and leave the desk, shelves, and everything else for later.
What are your most important moves?
Where do you tend to make the most mistakes? Are you not prepared for meetings? Improve those moves first.
What are your most crucial times?
When do you waste the most time? Cultivate one good habit (or break a bad one) that will preserve more of that time for you.
What's your most vital resource?
What resource are you wasting the most of? For example, find one household or business expense to cut.
Who matters most?
Who loses out the most in your life? Maybe one of your employees isn't getting the coaching he needs from you? Maybe a spouse or child needs more of your attention? On the other hand, if you're the type to give everything to others and leave nothing for yourself, pick yourself for a change and make things right.
We are addicted to our technological devicesâlaptops, tablets, mobile phones. We are not simply passive victims of interruption; we
seek
stimulation. While digital devices connect us to the world, the light side of digital inputs and outputs, information and creativity, comes with a dark side: intrusion and escape.
We can remedy our digital woes by working clean with our devices. The suggested regimens below, in no particular order, can help you assume control of your digital life and assist you in creating healthy boundaries among your work, family, and personal lives.
â
One day per week, don't use your devices.
â
For 1 week, turn off your devices from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.
â
For personal or family times when you are expecting incoming calls or e-mails, restrict your checking times to once per hour, on the hour, for 5 minutes max.
â
Don't permit devices in your bedroom. That means no cell phone or tablet alarm clocks!
â
If you must use a device for creative work, use software or willpower to block all communications apps for the length of your creative session. Make sure to turn off notifications or use your device's “Do Not Disturb” feature.
Remember that you are stronger than the temptations and distractions of the digital world!
Every week, log how many food items you discard from your refrigerator and cupboards because they've gone bad. After a few weeks, note any patterns. Ask yourself the following questions:
â
What can I buy less of?
â
What items can I use more often and how?
â
Which recipes can I learn that will help me use more of the items that usually go to waste?
â
What preparations can be a regular place to use my leftovers? For example, legendary chef Jacques Pépin makes what he calls a “fridge soup” every week. Salads are another way to enliven leftovers.
In the home kitchen, lack of preparation and knowledge can lead to serious waste. If saving food is something you care about, this is a great way to get practice limiting waste in other areas of your life.
RUN A SUITE OF ROUTINE CHECKLISTS
Here's another version of the checklist technique you learned in
The Second Ingredient: Arranging Spaces, Perfecting Movements
to help you use the little scraps of time and space that present themselves as an approach to total utilization.
I grade papers on the train, listen to the news while I walk, and answer e-mails while I'm on hold with customer service. As long as I don't need to rest, I jump at these opportunities. But lack of preparation often prevents me from using time and space as they present themselves. There is so much to be done, and it's hard to have that “time filler” work on hand when you need it. Creating a suite of time-use plans can keep you more conscious and ready to use more of your “small time” and help you internalize those Routines as habits. These plans might include:
Downtime Routines
âthings to do while
waiting
for things: in line, on the phone, even while slow Web sites load. If you have to stay in place while you wait, a Downtime Routine could be something that requires very little physical movement, like straightening your desk or flagging and returning e-mails. Or if you have more freedom to move, it could be as physical as exercising, filing, or washing the dishes.
Distraction Routines
âthings to do when you
can't concentrate
or
need a break
from a particular project. We all have intense work to do that requires us to take plentiful breaks. But when we don't want that “break time” to devolve into unproductive time, we might want to use those scraps of time to get things done on other projects. I do a lot of organizing and communicating during the times when I need a break from writing.
Route Routines
âthings to do when you know you are going to
be in or passing through a particular place.
Perhaps you walk to the copier a few times a day to retrieve papers. Use that walk to deliver something on your way there, like dropping off your expense report with the finance department. If you are taking a car
trip to the city for leisure, there might also be an errand you can do on the way. This habit is a great example of balanced movement.
Dismissal is a natural reflex during and after conflict, whether that dismissal is figurative (“That person is crazy!”) or literal (“You're fired!”).
Here are habits that can help you transform conflict into constructive action and preserve and strengthen relationships.
â
For every argument or disagreement you have with someone, channel your emotions into a private activity by listing the following: (a) one thing you could have done to prevent the conflict; (b) one thing you learned about the concerns of the other person. Regardless of whether you feel you've been wronged, your job is to think about yourself as having some power over the situation, and to think of the other person as human.
â
When a colleague or employee fails or falls short in his performance, list the following: (a) what he is good at doing; (b) what he is not so good at doing; (c) what you are good at teaching him to do; (d) where your teaching has failed to provide results. Your job here is to critique your own teaching methods in equal measure to your scrutiny of his performance.
This information will consciously and subconsciously prevent or transform future conflict.
Chris Cosentino evangelized for offal on television shows like
Iron Chef America
and Anthony Bourdain's
No Reservations.
But TV nearly derailed his mission in 2009. He and a partner cohosted a show where they traveled to different American cities to compete against local chefs in both cooking and inane contests during which Cosentino downed obscene amounts of food as feats of endurance. A long-distance cyclist, Cosentino's natural competitiveness and code of mise-en-place (finish the action, don't quit) got the best of him. He flew home from a shoot with a distended abdomen, in excruciating pain. Pastore rushed him to a hospital, where a doctor told him that he had cancer. It was a misdiagnosis. What he did have was a lacerated, ulcerated stomach from severe alkaline burns, caused in part by ingesting a bowl of hot peppers.
His specialist put him on a restricted diet. He was the chef of an Italian restaurant and couldn't eat tomato sauce or drink red wine. It took his stomach 5 years to heal. His self-respect took a little longer. People called him a sellout. Cosentino himself felt he had been part of a project that trivialized consumption, waste, and meanness. He witnessed his son and preschool classmates, after watching his show, trying to eat their lunches as quickly as possible. This was not what he wanted. Years later, at the 2014 Mad Food Conference in Copenhagen, Cosentino choked up while speaking of the experience, swallowing a different kind of humble pie.
Television was Cosentino's crucible, but it became his redress. In 2012, Cosentino decided to compete in
Top Chef Masters
to win money for a Parkinson's disease charityâhis uncle had the disease, and Fergus Henderson had it, too. He won in the final round with his beef heart tartare, puffed beef tendon, blood sausage, and Rosalie's tripe.
Back on his mission, Cosentino opened Cockscomb in San Francisco in 2014 with a menu that featured trotters, tripe, and the
house special: a wood-oven-roasted pig's headâall the elements cooked in different ways and arranged artfully on a wooden platter. He founded a Web site,
offalgood.com
, to share recipes and techniques with the average American. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Chef Dan Barber opened a pop-up restaurant called WastED, where Barberâjoined by like-minded guest chefs from Mario Batali and April Broomfield to Bill Telepan and Alain Ducasseâcreated $15 menu items made from normally discarded ingredients: a hamburger made from discarded juice pulp, “dumpster dive” salad made from bruised vegetables, and a rich beef broth made from the hard, outer layer of dry-aged beef. Pete Wells from the
New York Times
wrote that “almost every bite was delicious, with a few exceptions.”
Both Barber and Cosentino marketed the revolution. “Chefs in restaurants with white tablecloths get lampooned for being precious and elitist in a growing world where a billion people are hungry,” Barber later wrote. “The opposite is actually true.” Great chefs see waste all the timeâperfectly good but misshapen vegetables, organ meatsâand it pains them that they can't sell it. Barber wanted to educate the customer. Chris Cosentino hoped to change the way people ate and lived. His motivation hearkened back to the convivial homes of his grandparents in Rhode Island, their bounty and happiness. He wanted to honor their struggle and sacrifices, to live fully in the moment while at the same time honoring the past and guarding the future. Living this way wasn't easy. It took guts.
Recipe for Success
Commit to valuing space, time, energy, resources, and people. Waste nothing.
Working Clean as a Way of Life
MISE-EN-PLACE WORKS
Practiced successfully for decades by hundreds of thousands of people in professional kitchens across the world, the values and behaviors of mise-en-place are universal wisdom. Mise-en-place can work for us, too, providing a rock-solid foundation that will support almost anything our talent and willpower can create.
In this third course we extract the principles of mise-en-place from the kitchen and apply them to the outside world, combining them in a unified system of practical habits for everyday use. This system is called Work Cleanâit's mise-en-place that works for your life, whether you have an office job, are a teacher or student, or just want to be more organized at home.
The Work Clean system shares the fundamental “work clean” philosophy of mise-en-place: commitment to three central values and the use of 10 ingredients or behaviors. But your version of mise-en-place will use different tools and demand different rituals from those of the kitchen.