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Reading Log: Work Clean

Check out the full notes for “Work Clean: The Life-changing Power of Mise-en-place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind” by Dan Charnas

I started listening to the audiobook version of Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind by Dan Charnas. Still listening to it but wanted to practice sharing notes for books as I go along. (Vs. thinking I’ll write mega-posts about books after I finish and then not actually writing those posts or even finishing the books.)

Great book about being organized while working. I’ve never worked in a kitchen but have watched a lot of other people cooking on TV. That’s been enough for the chef stories in this book to be fascinating. It reminds me of every time Anthony Bourdain talks about the discipline of a professional kitchen being the contrast he needed from the chaos in his life in his younger days as a cook.

  • Pay attention to your movements — There are different movements that slow things down over time. If your arm is going across your body multiple times during prep, you might be able to move whatever it is you’re reaching for over to the side where your arm is. It’s a small change but they add up. Can you cut a movement out of your workflow to reduce friction? Can you automate something that takes 30 seconds that you do multiple times a day?
  • Pay attention to your workspace — For me, this has made me think a lot about how cluttered my digital workspace is. While I can get away from a messy desk by heading to a coffee shop, the digital workspace comes with me. This book makes me think I need to be more honest with the time it takes to keep things organized. And really believe it’s worth it to keep things clean a little bit at a time every day so that I don’t need to do huge audits every once in a while.
  • Pay attention to your time — This book hammers home some of the lessons from The Checklist Manifesto with specific examples of what chefs do. They design prep timing with a bunch of different dependencies between dishes. They also block the time off for prep work and cleaning as they go. This reminded me of the opening of Andy Grove’s High Output Management, which reveals the complexity involved in cooking breakfast (at scale!).

Work Clean might be going in my regular re-read rotation with books like Masters of Doom and Anything You Can Imagine. These are books that are sort of related to what I do professionally but far enough that they don’t actually make me think about work.

Lean toward learning and meaningful relationships (Adam Grant on the Tim Ferriss Show)

Here are a few parts from this episode that I wanted to share. The whole thing is great so find some time to listen to it if you’re interested in organizational change, finding strengths, and increasing effectiveness through the lens of attention management (instead of time management).

Tim Ferriss skews toward learning and building meaningful relationships.

Adam Grant: That’s so compelling because what it says to me is you decided that learning and relationship building are the two leading indicators of success.

But also they’re worthy ends in and of themselves. And so even if they don’t drive success, you’re still going to be glad you invested in something that sort of formed a meaningful connection or taught you something.

That is such a clever work around the problem of: do I know whether I’m accomplishing anything?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I wish I had come to that conclusion sooner, quite frankly. Because if you approach things with that lens, at least in my experience so far, eventually you’re gonna win. As measured or determined by the outside world, if that makes sense, right.

It’s like you can continue to acquire skills and deep relationships with people you care for who are also incredibly good at what they do— you will… Success cannot be kept from you indefinitely.

Adam Grant points out that this was part of how he looked at deciding to start a podcast when the spaces was already crowded:

Adam Grant: It’s something… It resonates a lot with me because I got into the podcast world much later than you did and felt like, you know, it was by that point, pretty crowded.

There are a lot of interesting people having interesting conversations. So I was pretty hesitant about it at first and then eventually said, okay, my biggest problem is I’ve spent the past five years getting invited into some of the most interesting organizations on earth and telling them things I already know mostly.

And I’m not learning anymore.

So even if the podcast completely fails, I am going to pick the people in the places that I want to learn from. And then I’m going to come away with new insights on the back end that in some format I will share.

It was extremely valuable. I mean, it gave me all kinds of ideas for articles and books and for research projects I wanted to take on. And, it would’ve been great even if we didn’t do a season two and beyond. And I think that… I think you’re right. I think there, there are ways to structure new projects so that even if they don’t achieve conventional success, you still gain more than you invested in them.

This all reminded me of a couple other things:

  • Naval Ravikant’s How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky — Naval stresses the need to think long term. Ten years not 10 days. Relationships and learning will compound. If you can learn to create media and learn to create with code and you can create a lot of leverage.
  • Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game — This is a book about long term thinking at both the individual and organizational level. “Nothing and no one can perform at 100 percent forever. If we cannot be honest with one another and rely on one another for help during the challenging parts of the journey, we won’t get very far.”

Do the simple thing first (whiteboards don’t scale and that’s okay)

Tool: Do the simple thing first.

I always feel a little bit smarter after listening to Invest Like the Best. On this episode, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger talk about taking Instagram from an idea to an exit to successfully scaling it up in a large company to leaving it behind. (They also talk about what they’re up to now.)

They talk about the early days of running ads:

V1 of our auction system was literally a whiteboard with a calendar that was drawn in Sharpie. Basically maybe March 5th would say: Banana Republic, they’re running the ad that day. And in the morning the engineers look at and be like, all right, we got to make sure Banana Republic is running that day. Which on one hand is what we’d call Clown Town. But actually it was like a great example of doing the simple thing first.

If that ad system didn’t work, meaning people weren’t interested in buying those kinds of ads on Instagram, why would you have spent a year building the perfect auction model? And when it worked, then you go build the thing that lets thousands and thousands of different kinds of ads be running on Instagram at any given time.

It’s easy to forget how different Instagram was in the early days. Tags and things didn’t work. People posted to their mainf eed multiple times a day without considering that they might become excommunicated from society.

This was a good reminder to start with the simple thing first (or: do things that don’t scale) if you’re trying something new. It can be really easy to optimize prematurely.

Quick example from this blog: I spent entirely too much time trying to get WordPress to run locally to get these podcast summary cards in a box:

podcast-summary-card

I started thinking about how the template would work and whether or not I knew how to use custom fields in WordPress and a bunch of other stuff that would make these things more systematic.

Anyway, I ended up not being able to get WordPress running locally so I just went with a simpler solution by writing CSS inline. And I have a MarsEdit formatting shortcut to paste the markup into each post. For the podcast name, title, and episode links, I copy and paste them in like a farmer.

It’d be nice to write a script for this but it’s working right now. And it’s definitely not the bottleneck for me writing posts regularly.

An example disagreement (between very smart people)

I just bought Ray Dalio’s Principles. Well, a physical copy. I listened to the audiobook around when it first came out but after seeing the physical copy in store it definitely seemed worth re-visiting.

I wanted to pour a little bit of concrete over something I listened to on this episode by sharing it here.

Reid Hoffman has a lightning round question:

  • “Artificial intelligence fills you with hope or dread? Pick one.”

Ray Dalio picks dread.

They talk it through:

HOFFMAN: So by the way, in radical transparency, I actually have hope. And unfortunately just because of time, because I do want to get through the Lightning Round questions, to our next conversation we’ll go into the AI stuff a little bit more.

DALIO: But let me ask you the question: Do you agree with the principle I just said? In other words if… Lets just chat a minute, because this is invaluable because I’d love your opinion, ok?

This reminded me of What You Do is Who You Are  by Ben Horowitz1. Because Ray Dalio wrote a book on principles and using them for decision making. But then you can hear in this discussion that he really walks the walk and brings principles into the discussion.

Agree on principles and then work from there. Reid Hoffman then also explains the importance of considering context.

In any case, it’s good to hear two smart people discuss something they disagree on2. Dalio for dread, Reid for hope.

(Also, I made a page where I’ll try collecting lightning round questions, starting with this one.)

Leash yourself (to turn values into actions)

Check out the full notes for “What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture” by Ben Horowitz

Last week, I bought a physical copy of Ray Dalio’s Principles. I listened to the audiobook around when it was initially released but want to revisit it in text form. I want to come up with some set of principles to refer to and dig into on this blog. None will be original but the set and prioritization could be useful. A few that come to mind:

  • bias to action (instead of over-thinking, over-planning, and over-discussing)
  • it depends (but pick a side)
  • 80/20 (and 64/4)
  • easy and sustainable (to do hard things consistently)
  • get your reps in (or choose your favorite version of the ceramics professor story)
  • aim for daily (because your day to day adds up to your life)
  • listen, learn, and move (mental stillness through body movement and mental movement through physical stillness).

Something like that.

It’ll probably just end up being d.school principles with Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin mixed in. That could be fine.

Anyway, having those principles and values is useful, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how values would translate to action. Mostly because I finished reading Ben Horowitz’s book What You Do is Who You Are recently and he writes about creating “shocking rules”:

Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years:

It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture.

It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?”

Shocking rules turn company values into individual actions day to day.

On a personal level, you can have shocking rules to translate your own life values into action. And it helps to check the daily rules you have for yourself right now to see if they align to things you say you value.

I say I want to put health and fitness first. Some mornings I wake up, zombie walk to the couch and then get stuck looking at newsletters and deals on my phone. I’ve been trying to put a shocking rule in place: only use the phone when it’s charging on our entryway stand. (I learned about the technique in a Cal Newport post.) It’s like putting your less-present, auto scrolling self on a leash.

To put health first, I want to make movement the very first thing in my day. The workout I think I could do on most days would be:

  • 100 kettlebell swings
  • 10 kettlebell get-ups
  • 30 minute walk/jog/run

(You might recognize the 100 swings, 10 get-ups as Simple & Sinister.)

It really is pretty straightforward, but I’m still thinking about removing the friction involved in it. Sometimes I need to pack my bag to go or need to do some other things that aren’t movement and then I eventually get stuck to the couch scrolling away.