Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  2.Unschedule the items that you can’t or don’t want to reschedule immediately, putting them back on your Action list if they are not already on it.

  3.Review and adjust your scheduled Routines. Make sure these time buckets square with what you have in store for the day ahead.

  Tip: I “check off” Action items that I have accomplished by switching their color, so I can easily see what’s been done during the course of my day and week.

  Second: Adjust Your Action List

  After clearing your station, your Action inbox will be filled with uncategorized items. Here’s what you do next:

  1.Assign each incoming Action item to a Mission. After that’s done . . .

  2.Adjust the order of each Mission to display the proper Frontburner at the top. Order the next several Backburners. Often a new Action will become the Frontburner, bumping the former Frontburner down a notch; or else a new Action will become a Backburner itself.

  Tip: Sometimes incoming Actions can be best executed by grouping them into Routines (i.e., calls to return, errands to run). If you have a digital Action list, you can use tags to create task lists for your Routines. For example, you might have three Actions from different Missions that are all things you want to read during one Routine you’ve set aside for reading. You can tag each of these Actions as “Reading” and refer to that bucket of Actions the next time you’re ready to run that Routine.

  You should now have a fully ordered Action list and no incomplete Actions from days past on your schedule.

  STEP THREE: PLAN YOUR DAY

  (approximately 10 minutes)

  You face tomorrow knowing the Actions and Routines that are already scheduled for tomorrow on our calendar. With that information, you:

  1.Make a list of the Actions and Routines already scheduled for tomorrow along with the other Actions and Routines you want to add to tomorrow.

  2.Identify which Actions are immersive (longer, requiring 30 minutes to several hours) and which are process (quicker, can be grouped together).

  3.Ballpark how many hours you have available for new Actions and Routines.

  4.Schedule new Actions and Routines on your calendar, aiming to

  a.Maximize the number of Frontburners

  b.Balance immersive and process time

  c.Stay under your Meeze Point

  Optional: Create a daily timeline, your schedule in list form. Every day, I create an analogue of my schedule on a sticky note. It contains exactly the same thing that my schedule does, but in list form. It’s not necessary, but it encourages me to always view my appointments as tasks—rather than as impediments to accomplishment. Plus, the size of a sticky note and the size of my handwriting work together to keep me under my Meeze Point. If I can’t fit all my tasks on a sticky note, I know I’m doing too many.

  Don’t overschedule. You may be tempted to throw a bunch of things on your calendar and fill up every available block of time in the name of efficiency. Don’t do that. Leave spaces in your schedule, especially before and after meetings, not only to account for travel time, but to allow for the kinds of interactions and processing of Actions that inevitably precede and follow them. Leave space, even to do nothing, or to call a friend, or to take a quick walk.

  Pushing yourself a little here and there is good. But you don’t want to create task lists and calendars that are so impossible to execute and disconnected from reality that you end up not trusting them, not trusting yourself, and not using them. If you know you don’t have enough time to accomplish all the things you’ve set out for yourself but schedule them anyway, that’s not ambition, that’s denial. Run your calendar or your calendar will run you, it’s that simple. You are going to have to say “no” to many things. You are going to have to be the executive, which necessitates being an executioner, the decider, the one who kills one option to save another.

  Instead of overscheduling, try underscheduling. Couture entrepreneur Coco Chanel once famously advised, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” It’s also great advice for creating your daily schedule. Give yourself one less thing to do. Your day will be full and complete anyway. And if you end up being able to do more than you’ve planned, then you get to experience the joy of exceeding your own expectations.

  STEP FOUR: GATHER YOUR RESOURCES

  As part of wrapping up your Daily Meeze, gather the resources you need for the next day. If you do your Daily Meeze at home, load up the bag you’ll be taking with you tomorrow. I check the next day’s weather the previous night so that I don’t spend precious moments the next day on my wardrobe. Some people lay their next day’s clothes out the night before. Do whatever you can do to give yourself as little as possible to plan or do the next morning.

  Track Your Progress

  Tracking your Daily Meeze helps you work your way to the 40-day mark, an important psychological and physiological milestone for creating a new habit, increasing your chances of success.

  Time’s Up!

  Now we put our planning tools in their proper places, turn off our devices, and leave our workstation. We enjoy the rest of our evening.

  Questions and Problems

  That’s the ideal. But what if, on some days, we have so many new items in our inputs that we can’t get through them all?

  Should we extend our Daily Meeze if we can’t get everything done? I think that 30 minutes of planning per day on average is enough to handle a working person’s busy life. Less than 30 minutes of planning wouldn’t be a serious enough commitment. Beyond 30 minutes begins to feel out of balance with our other needs and duties and causes a lot of stress. It’s vital that we constrain the Daily Meeze. Limits promote discipline and efficiency. We’re not going for a lazy, lopping, sprawling, distracted planning session. As we’ve said, your Daily Meeze should be a hustle. Keep it tight, move smoothly and quickly, make choices. But when all the demands of our Daily Meeze are difficult to squeeze into 30 minutes, here are some suggestions.

  Do part of your Meeze one day, and the other part the next. If one day you have an excess of stuff to organize, it may be fine to do the second part of that incomplete Meeze on the next day. For example, you might not get to clear all your inputs in 15 minutes. So you leave the rest of it until tomorrow. Usually we can miss a day of full planning and still remain ahead of the game. The important thing is to do your daily 30 minutes, whatever you happen to accomplish within it. If you keep a good planning practice, you will catch the excess the next day.

  Schedule an “overflow” appointment with yourself. If you’ve spent most of your Daily Meeze cleaning up incoming mail and absolutely need to make time to move things around on your Action list and calendar, schedule another 15 or 30 minutes with yourself for later or for the next day.

  Schedule different Meezes for different days. You may have to check your e-mail every day, but do you really need to check Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn that frequently? Or maybe you’ve found that you can schedule your Actions several days at a time, or that you don’t need to reorder your Mission lists every day, or even that organizing your task list is something you need only do once per week. If so, do those tasks only on certain days, freeing time to concentrate on other elements of your Daily Meeze.

  Make moves after your Meeze. Don’t execute any Action items during your Meeze. Just flag and log, and handle your Action items afterward.

  Even after trying these alternatives, you may find that 30 minutes is just not enough for the kind of workload you have. If you have the energy and willpower for a regular 45-minute or hour-long planning session, then you might be able to do that. In my experience, however, planning for more than 30 minutes per day gets you into an area where you might be accommodating bad habits rather than confronting them.

  Does my Daily Meeze need to be daily? To form a habit, yes. My teacher always said that it takes 40 days of unbroken practice to break an old habit, 90 days to confirm a new habit, and 120 days for you to become the ha
bit. One study published in 2009 found that turning a conscious action into a nonconscious, automatic one took an average of 66 days. I think a 40-day commitment to your Meeze is sufficient to start. If you skip a day in that initial 40-day period, start the 40 days over. It’s hard to form a habit and so easy to stop, so we want to treat our Daily Meeze as inviolate, the way a chef or cook would treat her mise-en-place.

  Can’t I skip the Daily Meeze on some days? Not until you make the Daily Meeze a habit. Thereafter you can skip weekends, vacations, and other days off. For me, the Daily Meeze is a spiritual practice that serves all parts of my life, so on weekends I focus more on organizing personal things. I rarely skip a day unless I am on vacation or immersed in a project that requires me to go on a personal retreat.

  What if I’ve stopped doing my Daily Meeze for a while? You will likely see the results in your work life. Start again today!

  If I work both at home and in an office, should I do two Daily Meezes? No. You will keep your good habits and behaviors at both workstations, but only one of them will be primary. If you feel you need to give them equal attention, consider doing your Daily Meeze at home on weekends, or alternate between your two workstations every other day.

  The ingredients in action

  The Daily Meeze embodies every ingredient of mise-en-place. It’s a planning ritual. It requires arranged spaces and perfected movements. It is cleaning as you go exemplified. While we execute our session, we must make first moves, finish actions, and slow down to speed up. The object of the Daily Meeze is organization, and what we are organizing mainly is our communication: keeping open eyes for the important things, calling back vital correspondence, and inspecting and correcting our calendar and Action list, toward the ultimate ideal of total utilization of our time and energy.

  MORNING: PROCESS

  Our evening was about preparation, and our Daily Meeze was intentional and intense. But that tension of planning now gives way to the release and relaxation of having planned, enabling us to wake this morning with a light heart and clear head.

  GREET THE DAY

  A big part of having a successful day is leaving enough time in the morning to nurture yourself with Personal Routines. Meditate, exercise, make a healthy breakfast, talk with your spouse, play with your child. If your job or career doesn’t afford you the luxury of those Routines, then at the very least you can wake 5 minutes earlier to center yourself for the day ahead. Once that day begins, honor your plans by following process.

  MORNING CHECK-IN

  You’ve planned for the probable, but anything is possible. In the moments before we leave home in the morning, we often make mistakes that affect our entire day by forgetting, overlooking, or ignoring things.

  Before you embark on your day, do the following:

  1.Check your schedule. Make sure you know your Actions, your moves for the day. Make sure you’ve gathered the resources you need.

  2.Check your vital inputs (like e-mail or your workplace’s messaging software). Has anything come up overnight that might necessitate a change in plans? Some days you may find that you need to rearrange your schedule. That’s fine! Your careful planning has not gone to waste. Quite the contrary, your planning should lessen the anxiety of change and give you the confidence to say “no” or “later” to the things that you must push off your schedule. The people to whom you’ve made commitments will appreciate your forewarning, rather than bear you ill will for not making good on promises to them.

  3.Run checklists. To minimize error, use checklists. Some of these lists will be mental or mnemonic. For example, I have a word I say before I leave the house—“BUCK,” for Bags, Umbrella, Cap, Keys—because too often I forget those things. On days that I teach class, I run an extended checklist on my computer because I have in the past forgotten too many items on that list not to do so. I resist running the list sometimes because it feels too obsessive; but as stupid as I may feel when I do it, I always feel and look good when I come to class prepared.

  GETTING THERE

  Part of our planning and our execution is thinking about when and how we want to arrive: hurried, harried, flustered, and late? Or early, calm, prepared, and happy?

  We really do have control over these feelings. The two biggest levers of control are:

  1.Giving ourselves enough time on our schedules to travel. Whether flying 3,000 miles or simply walking across the street, we know how much time to allow ourselves. We just have to account for it in our planning.

  2.Honoring the start and end times we’ve set. If we know it takes 45 minutes to get where we’re going and we leave only 30 minutes to get there, or if we fail to end a previous engagement in time to make our next appointment, we dishonor our plan and the time of those who await us—especially if that next appointment is one we’ve made with ourselves for, say, an immersive work session.

  Is it okay to be late occasionally? Absolutely. Are there good reasons to be late? For sure, just so long as our reasons aren’t on balance due to lack of preparation or poor process. The point isn’t to never be late or spontaneous. The point is to stop the wasted time, energy, and resources that come from our carelessness. Life produces enough chaos without us manufacturing more of it.

  PROCESS TIME

  The first thing you do when you get to your workplace is spend a short block of time—perhaps 30 minutes—on process work. For an office worker, this Process Routine might mean catching up on e-mails, voice mails, and paperwork. For an artist or freelancer who works from home, this might entail starting the dishwasher to make sure that process happens while she focuses on her next immersive task; or calling the plumber for a visit because once her work starts, she’ll forget to do this. For the plumber, that might mean checking in with dispatch between house calls.

  For any professional, process time is about making first moves—setting processes in motion that can happen while the hands and mind are otherwise engaged.

  TRANSITION MEEZE

  When process time is done, before moving into the next appointment or task, do a 1- to 5-minute Transition Meeze.

  The goal with the Transition Meeze is the deskbound equivalent of cleaning as you go. It enforces and reinforces arranged spaces and keeps things in their right places. Here’s how to do it.

  1.Reset the table. Put the previous project away. Close and replace open files. Close open applications. Close browser windows. Wipe any debris off your desk. Do kichiri, or straighten your desktop, setting all objects in their right places.

  2.Check your schedule. Before you jump into your next project, relax and check your schedule and Action list. What’s coming up? Who’s added you to a meeting? Does anything need to be moved around?

  3.Check your e-mails. Quickly flag all the e-mails that need action. Archive them all. Then go into your Flagged folder and decide which e-mails you can address quickly, in a few seconds or minutes, and execute those.

  If you have time left over, do something to release the tension of work. Stand up and stretch. Talk to a friend. Check social media or your favorite Web site. Drink some water. Take some time for this Transition Meeze, but no more than 5 minutes.

  A good Transition Meeze will make your Daily Meeze a breeze. For example, if you tend to leave things in clumps and piles for the end of the day, you may find yourself unconsciously dreading or avoiding your daily planning session. But if you work clean in the transitions between your big actions and appointments, your daily planning will feel lighter and be more productive.

  IMMERSIVE TIME: USING INTENTIONAL BREAKS

  We’ve set aside 2 hours for writing an important report. We’ve arrived at our workstation on time. We have our resources at the ready. We begin.

  Yet just 2 minutes later we find ourselves goofing off online.

  We go into our tool kit and begin an intentional break (see The Fifth Ingredient: Finishing Actions), logging each break we take in our session. For the first hour, we’re having a hard time focusing, so we log “mental�
� breaks frequently. Occasionally we are interrupted by colleagues, so we log a couple of “work” breaks. But gradually we settle in. We took five breaks in the first hour and only two breaks in the second. As we near the finish, we get antsy to take another break. But we look at the progress we’ve made on the memo. We make a choice to push through and finish the action. We get the work done. We feel good.

  AFTERNOON: PRESENCE

  After noon our best-laid plans and carefully followed processes often crumble under the stresses and surprises of the day. But with proper mise-en-place and the awareness that comes from it, even sudden changes in direction are easier and cause less upheaval because we stay present.

  THE SURPRISE: REACTING TO TRIGGERS

  In the middle of an immersive project, we’ve muted our phones and quit our e-mail program to keep ourselves focused. But because we also know that we work in a company where crises often emerge, we’ve made sure to check e-mail regularly—triggered by an hourly chime we’ve set for ourselves on our phone—so that we keep open eyes and ears for what’s happening in our work environment.

  At 1:30 p.m., we open our e-mail program to find that an urgent meeting has been called for 3:00 p.m.: The president of the company is asking all department heads to revise their budgets for a 10 percent cut. The meeting not only requires our attendance but our preparation. We know that we’ll need at least an hour to prepare and an hour for the meeting, and that means our plans for finishing this project by 4:00 p.m. are in jeopardy. This calls for some quick thinking and action.