In Work Clean, Dan Charnas talks about Mise en Place – the organizational system that chefs use to deliver meals under high pressure and time restrictions. He then attempts to transfer some of these lessons to office work, and to understand how the self-discipline of chefs could also help the modern office worker keep a cleaner mind.
I have disputed elsewhere one of the principles of time management Dan recommends. That being said, there are many principles in there that ring true, and which could have a high impact on work performance and preserving time and other resources.
The book is worth reading for its own sake and the interesting chef stories it contains – but whether or not you are a fan at peaking into other high performance professional’s lives like me, here are a few ideas to amouse your bouche 
, before the main meal of the book. And as I go through them, lets dream up the kind of AI that could be built to implement principles going in a similar direction, and see whether that AI would be the stuff utopias or dystopias are made of.
Here are some of the chef-inspired principles Dan recommends:
Returning to zero between actions – that is cleaning one’s station, and putting away every utensil so that you can reuse them before starting something else. The equivalent in the office world is closing and putting away everything from one project before beginning something else.
This is hard for most people that I know of, especially in digital terms. For some people, some tabs always remain open for some other day, “not to get lost”, and they gather and gather until it is hard to even have space for the day, or find the things that are in process now.
This is the physical equivalent, perhaps, of leaving objects on surfaces in your home, so you can find them, while surfaces slowly get fuller and fuller to the point where you can’t find anything anymore – BECAUSE you wanted to find everything with ease. (Also clearing your surfaces is the action most likely to make you feel like your house is clean and peaceful).
The fear of not finding things anymore is what drives the wrong approach in both cases, so AI that aims to help you return to zero will have to also counteract that all-too-human fear.
For example, imagine an AI that rearranges your Desktop, throwing away unused items. Sure that is the stuff of dreams for some people, but the stuff of nightmare for others. A more balanced design would ask you whether you are ready to let go of certain items – however this may not be a good idea on two counts – 1. some people find it very hard to let go, and 2. this might take a fair amount of willpower for you to decide what you want to let go of. We now know that, even for people with amazing willpower, there are limits to how much we can use our executive and willpower functions a day, and it would probably be great to if and AI system would protect your willpower reserves, rather than deplete them.
A gentler approach requiring almost no willpower on the part of the human would be to have the AI make unused items on your desktop slowly fade away, so that you could bring them back with a click if you wanted them there, and “save them”. This process of fading with be similar to that of human memory, and would give you more physical and mental time to deal with the to-be-archived items. Seeing these items fade and not choosing to rescue them would already mean you are either not seeing anything on your Desktop at all because of the clutter (has been my case a few times :D) or that you are slowly parting with them – you are checking them visually and deciding they are probably not important enough to be saved.
A more elaborate and AI-dignified arrangement would be to make predictions on when you would be most likely to use or need such items, because while you have not used them in a while, they might be seasonal knowledge items, like clothes. For example, you might work on grant proposals and fundraising for your company every 6 months or few years. In the mean time, you might want nothing to do with the paperwork relating to this – but you would need to know this is safely stored and retrieved for you when you need it again, possibly without you having to remember exact folder names, but rather contexts in which those files were used (like fundraising).
The psychological element of such designs is extremely important, and the needs of the human really have to be taken into account. For example, when dealing with your tabs, would you be ready for systems that close your tabs, so that you can start from a clean place, or would that feel like you have been returned to nothing and lost the information you dug for so deeply the other day, but didn’t have the time to assimilate? For most of the people I know, the fear of losing information is the main problem, so I would like an AI system that gives me the possibility to return to entire sessions I had for the last month (each day); not just finding items in history, but things grouped by windows too. Ideally, we would build AI that keeps track of my informational digging – not just the pages, but the path too, even if the path is scattered across many windows. AI that can summarize to me how my informational search progressed the other day, even if I searched for 8 distinct things for different projects across 53 tabs.
For example, this AI would say – yes mistress, at the end of yesterday, you had looked at holidays in Cyprus, and flirted with the possibility of two interesting all inclusive resorts, in different areas of the country. The differences between them where this or that and you are yet to make a decision and close that process. On the other hand, you worked on business development and were watching a course on communicating better to your leads. You seem to have lingered enough on these 3 linkedin profile and did not close their tabs, so I decided to put them on your list of leads, with a short bullet point of what each of them is doing. Were your intentions to contact this one because she is good at philantropy fundraising and the other because he is interested in empowering women projects? (the AI could attempt to assess your intentions based on the overlap between your interests, your projects, and a person’s profile).
“I have also closed your tabs on imdb – here are the movie pages you looked at that you haven’t seen yet, and I only wrote down in your Entertainment program links the ones that are above your 7.5 preferred score threshold – if you want to retrieve the others or want to make an exception for a particular movie, let me know.”
Yes, this AI would definitely improve my life, make me feel like I haven’t lost track of the things I was searching for, and that some organization has happened without me. In a certain sense, such AI would make me feel like the entire service industry is meant to make me feel – like I am cared for 🙂
Dan Charnas has many other fun principles which I believe could be helped by a smartly designed wellbeingAI system. Here is another one:
Plan Plate First
The principle of planning plate first is about starting complex projects with the end (plate) in mind. In Dan’s words: “Just as some chefs begin a dish by drawing a plate, for your own projects, first envision the moment of delivery, then plan backwards from it, What resources will you need to make it look, read, feel, or sounds perfect? What time will you need?“
An AI system helping you implement this would make sure to start by enquiring about your desired end result. You are preparing a presentation – when does it need to be ready? How long does it need to be? What kind of an audience is it for?
It would then proceed to make sure you have access to the right resources to make this work. It would block the time you need to prepare the presentation. It would obtain your visuals, or create cool infographics from the data you want to include. It would dig up information about your audience.
Then, as you keep on building your presentation, it would keep on relating what you are doing with the end goal. Is the language you are using reflecting your audience? Do you have a main story? Perhaps it would know things about story structure (apparently they are only 7 basic story plots in the world). If it would know how a good presentation should be structured, think how much fewer hair-pulling boring presentations we would all have to endure! It would have knowledge of literary aesthetics and make comments such as “You are putting too much information in the Introduction”; “No Michael, I don’t advise you have 3 introductions”; or “What exactly are the main points you are building up towards?” and “You are crafting a masterful first part of the presentation, but according to our schedule, it would be great if you would focus on the second part for a bit now too“ (for those perfectionists out there).
Finally, it would be a wise enough AI to know that all the time spent on any great presentation can be thoroughly ruined by not spending any time on preparing its delivery. So it would have planned some time for you to rehearse your presentation, and perhaps it would even offer some simple presentation coaching principles – for example “You are running out of time before the most interesting part, Daniela – maybe you can spend less time elaborating on the introduction?” or “You are going too fast through this part – shall we remove some of the bullet points? Or decide which ones we will not get in depth with?“ or “Louder please ! Think of the poor sod at the end of the room that would love to hear what you have to say.“
A great AI (like a great person) should not be narcissistic and believe it can do everything greatly, but also know its limits. It could tell you “I think you are doing a great job presenting now, on the metrics that I can measure. But you have exceeded my feedback ability. Perhaps we should call one of your friends and ask? I have recorded your last presentation – I suggest we send it to Mark and Diana – they are part of your circle of friends and colleagues that have the most experience with public speaking and also understand these topics you are giving a presentation on!“.
Thinking of all of this has made my mouth watering slightly. And it made me realize that some of my fellow Toastmasters (a public speaking organization) might have even better ideas on how such a system could help them prepare to impress the audience in their next speeches. How about you? Would you work with such an AI into becoming a better speaker and presenter? Are they other domains in which you would like a wellbeingAI system to keep your mind clear and on the goal, and get you to think “plate first”?
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Author: Dr.Dr. Ana-Maria Olteteanu