Mental Mise en Place
This past week, at culinary school, we were discussing the concept of mise en place, which is roughly translated as “put in place.” Most literally, it’s the practice of gathering and preparing the ingredients and equipment you need to make something before you start cooking.
With a slightly larger view, mise en place also includes the work to set yourself up for success.
For example, for Thanksgiving, planning to defrost a turkey for three days and brine it for another 24 hours would be part of the process. SImilarly, you might plan by proactively clearing out the leftovers over the previous week to make room in the refrigerator for all the Thanksgiving food you’ll buy.
For a restaurant or catering business, an extension of this principle might mean selecting cooking techniques that allow as much work as possible to be completed well ahead of the service in order to make the final moments of cooking and serving more efficient, smooth, and consistent.
Of course, this thinking isn’t restricted to food preparation. Certainly, anyone who has developed a project plan, ordered supplies for the office, or bought a diaper subscription so that you always have them on hand is familiar with these thought processes.
But there’s one critical piece of equipment we often leave out of these plans: our own minds.
A client was recently telling me that he wanted to reserve time for more deep work on some strategic projects—the things that require creativity and for which there are no clear answers. Because his schedule as COO of the organization is normally packed, his plan was to do the deep work on Friday afternoon.
I responded, “My mind is usually fried toward the end of the week. For you, how does Friday afternoon compare to your peak creativity?”
He conceded that to make progress on the strategic projects, the ideal times for his deep work were actually on Tuesday and Wednesday. The critical piece of equipment for those projects was a fresh and creative mind, and he couldn’t put that in place on Fridays.
This dynamic similarly came up in a recent group coaching session. One woman mentioned that she was trying to write a book but wasn’t making as much progress as she’d like. Another person asked her, “Do you not have time or do you not have enough inspiration?”
The question caused a realization that she couldn’t just show up and perform in her writing time. Instead, she needed to marinate her mind in inspiration to make the writing time productive. I’d suspect that the inspiration preparation might itself look “unproductive”—resting, wandering, reading, watching movies—but it’s critical to prepare her “mental equipment” to perform its duties effectively.
For me, the lesson of this is that we should spend more of our planning time thinking about what it takes for our minds to tackle the items on our to-do lists. It’s not just time—it’s time in the right mindset that matters.
Practically, we might implement tactics like reserving preparation time on our calendars. Just like we would hold time ahead of our 3pm dentist appointment for the physical commute to the dental office, we can identify what’s required to make the mental commute to whatever mindspace we need for success.
In micro form, that might mean just taking 5 minutes between meetings to reset and reflect on what mindset we want to take into the following one.
I suspect this might also call for us to reserve longer blocks of time. In the book The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker writes about this compellingly:
“The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small dribblers are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.”
Finally, if you’re like most professionals I know, your schedule for the next few weeks is chaotic and packed, but the schedule for 8 weeks from now is almost completely free. Hence, even though it feels ridiculously early, now may be a good time to start looking at your calendar for 2023. Are there calendar strategies you can put in place now that can increase the chances of maximizing your time in the right mindset?
For example, when I did this exercise, I landed on the following:
Identifying vacation time
Reserving blocks for my peak creative time
Creating containers for meetings that I can do at off-peak times
Reserving wrap-up time each day so that I’m less likely to be rushing into childcare time (or rushing to make sure my kids aren’t the last ones left at pickup from after school care).