Work clean
by Dan Charnas · first published 2016
90% recommend10% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Applies the kitchen idea of mise-en-place to organizing work and life, explaining the system beyond setup and prep; useful for people who want a concrete daily planning structure, like a 30-minute planning session.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"In Work Clean, Dan Charnas reveals how to apply mise-en-place outside the kitchen, in any kind of work. Culled from dozens of interviews with culinary professionals and executives, including world-renowned chefs like Thomas Keller and Alfred Portale, this essential guide offers a simple system to focus your actions and accomplish your work."--Book jacket.
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Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind Charnas, D. https://www.workclean.com/
on “Ask HN: What are the best books for professional effectiveness?” ↗There's a book by Dan Charnas called "Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind" that does a great job of explaining the system of mise en place beyond just setup and precutting vegetables. My favorite…
on “Software Mise En Place” ↗There is a book called "Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind" that discusses this philosophy further and how someone can integrate these principles into their work life. It was a pretty…
on “Marie Kondo's Advice Praised by Scientists: “Clutter Is Not a Good Thing”” ↗…frequently pop() the top of the list. It's OK (and common!) to have a todo list of 100 things, as long as you give yourself time to think about prioritization of the tasks. Someone on here recommended "Work Clean" by Charnas. It's a little fluffy at the end, but he does provides a structure with which to place and schedule tasks that I found pretty useful called Daily Meeze. It's just meta-planning (plan/schedule…
on “Daydreaming about the future instead of doing work today” ↗There is a fantastic book called 'Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work and Mind' by Dan Charnas that goes into more depth about Mise-en-Place. https://www.workclean.com/
on “Mise-en-place for knowledge workers” ↗I tried to use GTD for quite a while. I abandoned it in favor of Timeboxing, using Work Clean for the precise implementation. I used org-mode to put it to use, it's flexible enough even though GTD was a big influence on its design. https://www.amazon.ca/Work-Clean-life-changing-mise-en-place...
on “Ask HN: How do you force yourself to do boring tasks?” ↗…alternative methods to focused work and productivity? Set aside time at the beginning of your day to make a list of the things you want to do, prioritize that list and then do them. https://www.amazon.com/Work-Clean-life-changing-mise-en-plac... This book helped me quite a bit.
on “Ask HN: Alternatives to the Pomodoro technique?” ↗…other than that I’m pretty consistent. Once in a while on a weekend or holiday, I’ll do no alarm and will sleep until sometime between 5:30 and 7:30AM. My 30-minute planning session is based on the book Work Clean by Dan Charnas. Really great way for me to prioritize and have a clear plan for what I want to accomplish on a given day. The most interesting thing I’ve found with this is that there’s some days that…
on “Ask HN: What's Your Morning Routine?” ↗That's a great read, although I remember reading it published under the title "Work Clean". A cursory glance at Amazon.co.uk looks like the two titles have identical text however the Kindle edition of "Work Clean" is half the price of the one re-issued as "Everything In Its Place", for anyone…
on “Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable” ↗…multiple times) - The Martian (I've read multiple times) - An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (series) Non-ficton - The Model Thinker (super dense, I'll need multiple re-reads) - Chief Joy Officer - Work Clean - Outlive
on “Ask HN: What books do you want to read over again?” ↗Also discussed at length in the book Work Clean by Dan Charnas
on “First make the change easy, then make the easy change (2021)” ↗