Quick and Dirty Book Review: Work Clean, Dan Charnas

It took me two days to read Dan Charnas Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organise Your Work, Life, and Mind. It would have taken less time, but I had a busy weekend, which meant I was largely carving out blocks of time to read through the book as fast as possible. I was two-thirds done when I raved about it in the Sunday Circle. I am now finished.

And, upon finishing, I scrolled back to the start of the ebook and started reading it from the start. It’s that kind of book.

I love me a good book about productivity. I devour them like popcorn, especially when they’ve got odd little hooks. Charnas’ approach is all hook. He looks at the way people learn to be chefs, the system and the mindset that’s instilled in them in order to keep a busy kitchen functional. He extrapolates out from that, talking about mise-en-place as a philosophy and approach to life. He’s an incredible storyteller with a pool of interesting subjects, so it makes for an entertaining read.

It’s also an incredibly interesting philosophy, right up until Charnas tries to formalise it into a productivity system in the final chapters.The system, if you’re the kind of person who has read Getting Things Done, comes off as a little derivative and naff. It plays to the conceit a little too strongly for my tastes, and it’s just…weaker….than the rest of the book.

But the bits before that? Wonderful. Incredibly useful. I’d gotten my money’s worth by the second or third chapter, because I am the kind of person who hacks together productivity systems and looks for points of refinement. I run my life on a shambling Frankenstein’s monster of GTD, Accidental Creative, and Bullet Journal, cherry picking the best bits of those systems and leaving out the stuff that didn’t work. And I was hacking bits of mise-en-place real fast, especially when it came time to do some big tasks on tight deadlines.

Time I would have wasted on flail has been replaced by time spent building systems, timelines, and lists of tools I have available (and those I need to acquire).

Three quarters of this book is recommended reading. Highly recommended, The kind of thing I’m going to ramble about to my friends who are all about productivity systems, and a tool for having more interesting conversations with some friends who are former chefs gone into management.

The final quarter of the book? Skim it, unless you’re desperately in need of a system and are drowning in your workload.

You’ll already have the bulk of what you need by the time you hit that point.