Mise-en-place: The Most Important Part of Any Task is the Beginning

A wonderful piece in Harvard Business Review argues for the technique mise-en-place. The piece highlights chef and best-selling author Anthony Bourdain, for whom the ritual is more than the latest time-saving trick; Bourdain starts his day the same way every time—and so do the chefs who work for him—because it’s an invaluable professional practice. 

Because Anthony Bourdain prepares early, he has plenty of time to relax.

“Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks,” Bourdain wrote in his runaway bestseller Kitchen Confidential. “As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system… The universe is in order when your station is set…”

Mise-en-place

Chefs like Anthony Bourdain have long appreciated that when it comes to exceptional cooking, the single most important ingredient of any dish is planning. It’s the “Meez” that forces Bourdain to think ahead, that saves him from having to distractedly search for items midway through, and that allows him to channel his full attention to the dish before him.
So what is it?

Mise-en-place  translates into “everything in its place.” In practice, it involves studying a recipe, thinking through the tools and equipment you will need, and assembling the ingredients in the right proportion before you begin. It is the planning phase of every meal—the moment when chefs evaluate the totality of what they are trying to achieve and create an action plan for the meal ahead.

Avoiding the worst thing

If mise-en-place can plausibly be described as the best way to start one’s day, what’s the worst? What’s the thing to avoid at all costs?
Glad you asked.

Shane Parrish, author of the irreplaceable blog Farnam Street, made a similar point in the LinkedIn piece ‘9 Habits You Need to Stop Now’. Second on the list was: Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
Parrish cites Dilbert creator Scott Adams as thinking, “One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.”

In fact matching skills to the time of day is one of the most important changes you can make to improve your working habits.

Why?

Parrish has answers, “You want to get out of a reactive loop. If you move creative and thinking work to the start of the day, when we’re at our peak, you’ll have the rest of the day to be reactive.”

Of course, utilizing the ritual mise-en-place at the day’s beginning will allow for the early part of the day—before fatigue sets in—to be used for creative work. The kind of creative work Rafael Nadal does in between points—toweling off, examining a series of balls, um, adjusting his pants—is an elaborate set of rituals that allow him to take stock, to buy time for the mental (and sometimes physical) process of going through a mise-en-place. And once the points start, there are few in the history of his sport more creative or more powerful than Nadal.



And all that work before points lets him do stuff like this during them:



Plato was right—the most important part of any task is the beginning. Starting the day with mise-en-place (and not email!) will assist in many good beginnings.