Digital Mise en Place

The beauty & practicality of organising your digital spaces for efficiency.

At school I was always the kid that placed their books and pens in just the right spot on the desk. There was a comfort in feeling that everything had its place and was where it should be. My pencil case contained all of the pens, pencils and stationary I needed, and nothing extra. Realistically there were little to no efficiency gains in doing so, but somehow the sense of order made me feel more together. I felt more efficient, and that is what mattered.

I hold this same mentality now as an adult. I work on a small mango wood writers desk and although there are objects placed around the desk, I know where everything is when I want it. Turn to the left, and I have direct access to a whiteboard without ever leaving my seat. Turn to the right and I have a line of sight out of my downstairs office window across to the horses field opposite. Often I will find myself staring out of the window, seemingly absent minded but actually deep in thought. A small 65% keyboard sits directly in front of me that I like because I can type without needing to move my hands from their resting place. Moving my left hand to the side there sits my paper journal and pen, at the ready should I want to write anything down. To the right, my trusty mug, a necessity for those long days.

But the majority of that is superficial, much like my desk organisation skills at school, because the majority of my work happens digitally.

Over time, I have come to understand how I work best on my computer. On my monitor, I put a lot of emphasis on having the minimal amount of information on the screen at any given time. My dock is automatically hidden to avoid distraction, I favour Raycast which allows me to set shortcuts to quickly navigate to the most frequented places on my computer. I am unapologetically a “no tabs remain open” kind of guy.

It’s almost as of your workspace becomes worn in over time, as if the more you sit and work there the more comfortable it becomes. Like your favourite pair of trainers that are so worn in they could be perceived as tatty but are so comfortable and familiar you daren’t throw them away for a new pair.

When I think about it, this setup is a natural architecture in that it has evolved over time to suit my work habits. Sure, I have made small tweaks here and there, but I never sat down one day and decided to be intentional about designing all of this. It just formed, and it has been working really well for me ever since. Small tweaks happen every now and then, but I avoid big upheavals as much as possible. I am protective of this environment I have built myself however, because I value efficiency and simplicity. Any new tool that finds its way into my workflow has had to really fight its way to get there and provide value to me.

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I didn’t hear about the concept of ‘Mise en Place’ until much later in life. As a phrase with its origins shrouded in the culinary world, it was aptly a cooking show that introduced it to me. Translated as “putting in place”, the idea is that a cooks workstation should be clean, tidy and their ingredients and tools well organised for maximum efficiency.

I learned more about this concept in Dan Charmers “Work Clean”, which to this day holds an unwavering spot as my best productivity book of all time. Top chefs verge on the borders of obsession about the levels of organisation of their workstations, and equally hold their workers to an incredibly high standard.

The argument is that a meticulous need for order is beneficial for success, whether that be speed, productivity or creativity. If everyone in the kitchen is putting the same emphasis on preparation, organisation, process and focus, a group of people becomes a well-oiled machine. Over time kitchens collectively build up muscle memory meaning that complex dishes can be created with minimum effort. There is something undeniably beautiful about the hours spent creating a dish akin to a piece of art, and that art being replicated over and over again for the customers enjoyment with maximum efficiency.

The fundamental philosophy stays the same, but for different chefs their ideal workstation will look different. If you are right handed, presumably you will place your knifes to the right of you. Ingredients to the left so they can easily be picked up and chopped. Subtle yet critical decisions for the perfect flow that have been formed through years of practice and microscopic tweaks.

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Even if you haven’t spared it much thought, you probably have created you own version of mise en place, much like I have with my digital workspace.

I am fortunate that through my line of work, I get a front row seat to the working patterns and minds of software engineers and technologists who are on top of their game. Ironically, the most productive people I have ever worked with think very little about productivity, but more about efficiency.

Watching an engineer work who has fine-tuned their environment is a beautiful thing. There is flow, continuity & finesse. They achieve a lot with minimal thought, the same way that a chef assembles a dish with minimum physical movements. Navigating a codebase with hundreds of thousands of lines of code forces you to build shortcuts and workflows, and these eventually become second nature with enough practice or repetition. Sure, some folks workspaces may appear cluttered, but this is intentional clutter, perhaps akin to the same way that my desk is filled with objects I know will be useful. It’s not uncommon to see engineers walking into meetings in the office with their own keyboards they bought from home - the inefficiency of having to press keys that are slightly in a different space enough of an issue to carry a keyboard around for the day.

This productivity is the kind that forms without thinking too much about it. Rather than spending too long thinking about clever ways to organise & automate, or which tool is the best to use - these individuals pick a tool and then spend enough time with it until they have mastered it, making small tweaks as they go to ultimately become as efficient as possible. Switching from one tool to the other is considered - many engineers I know take their notes & todo’s directly in their code editor for minimum context switching.

Digital mise en place.

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I have often tried to have conversations with these people about digital organisation, but it’s not something we really think too much about as an industry so it always raises an eye brow. This is why mise en place is so interesting to me, that intentionality of organisation is so engrained in cheffing as well as other industries. My background before software was construction as a labourer, whose job it was to essentially let the more qualified workers stay in a physical flow. I carried things around, cut things to size and handed items to people on ladders. The correct flow and having a decent labourer for a construction worker could make a massive amount of difference to a days pay, as often construction jobs are paid per room/flat/house finished. I am curious as to why that same level of meticulousness is not so much of a conscious thought in software/tech.

The purpose of mise en place in the culinary world is about speed, precision and efficiency - replicating a work of art over and over again at pace and without unwavering quality. The same could be set without construction, if you replace work of art with functionality. Granted, that is fundamentally different from what people in tech solve, but surely we can repurpose this philosophy to our advantage?

What about if digital mise en place made us more effortlessly creative and prolific at our craft?

We put a lot of thought into the tools that we use and the workflows we create with those tools, but not necessarily how they all connect together, how they are all organised and ultimately how they help us do our jobs better.

The ‘second brain’ movement is a nice start in thinking about ways to make us more creative, but the more I experience it the more that I think it is doing more harm than good. It has become an excuse for people to complicate and over-engineer, rather than strip back and simplify. It’s a great way of feeling productive, without actually being productive at all.

There are a few examples I have seen more recently of workflows from some of the “productivity gurus” out there, that are akin to a five generation family tree - a complete mess of tools and workflows. If you need more than thirty seconds to explain what tools you use to get your job done, then you are doing something really wrong my friends.

Below is an example on the Second Brain youtube channel, of the workflow of Ryder Carroll who is the inventor of one of the best and simplistic productivity tools (the bullet journal) of all time that for many people (myself included) has been life changing.

Ryder’s “Second Brain” - more complex than necessary?

This is none other than complexity porn. I get overwhelmed looking at it, and you can’t in a hundred years begin to convince me that this is in any way efficient no matter what your creative pursuit is. I think it is outright damaging to hold this on a pedestal because many people truly believe now this is peak performance and look for new and innovative ways to achieve one very specific thing in their workflow. As with software architecture, the more pieces you have making up a system, the more chances there are for things to go wrong. I have the upmost respect for Ryder, but what you see there is the digital equivalent of putting a picture hook in the wall with a sledgehammer.

This complexity goes completely against the ethos of mise en place - that simplicity, efficiency and repeatability holds the upmost importance. I want to celebrate the achievements of people who are doing the opposite of whatever this is, by building great things with the simplest of tools.

I daresay that if we started paying attention to our digital workspaces with the same mentality that chefs examine their kitchen counter and workflows and stripping out every little excess piece of chaff we could find and focusing on efficiency over complexity, we would start to reap the benefit of not just being more productive, but being more creative, proficient and ultimately less overwhelmed.

Digital mise en place, for me is about being intentional with our workspaces and what we have there. It’s about approaching things with a minimalistic/simplistic mindset. It’s about using tools enough that you start to feel familiar with them, rather than flitting around in an effort to find the “ultimate stack”. It’s about not letting your tools get in your way. It’s about thinking, “this is the least amount I need to achieve what I need to” and then getting it done, and then learning from that flow for next time.

If you ever feel overwhelmed or that your tools are constraining you, then take a hard look at what you are doing. Does everything need to be there? What can you simplify?

“Excellence arises from refining good process - how can I do this better, or easier, or with less waste?” — Dan Charnas

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