Many people’s work day brings with it a high level of information complexity. Have you ever felt slightly lost in front of your many projects and not known where exactly to pick the thread back up again? Our quasi-instant access to a lot of information is a thing of beauty, but we are also paying a high price for it – the price of information fatigue.
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.
Besides ideas on working clean, mindset and space management, there are things about time management in there too. I will talk about some of the principles Charnas recommends in a future article, and especially on how AI can be used to implement principles in such work clean directions to enhance performance and productivity, protect time and keep a clean mindset. But first I wanted to discuss one of the time management tips given here – because it brings up an interesting question: that of which time is more valuable?
Charnas draws a line between immersive time, and process time:
- immersive time is time in which you execute projects that happen largely independent of external process and other people. For example, working on creative projects that take a long amount of dedicated, uninterrupted time.
- process time is time in which you execute or start tasks and processes linked to other external processes and people; projects that might not need your full presence, but that you need to start and maintain. A kitchen example of process time is time spent putting the pan and oil on the stove, so that it is already heated when time comes to throw in the vegetables. Or starting the rice, which needs time to simmer on its own. Interpersonal process time is very connected to managerial processes – for example approving expenses via email, doing short reviews so that people can get on with work or starting people on projects that need your attention for a short time, but unlock the work, movement and time of other people.
Charnas is happy to talk at length about how important process time is, in terms of its potential to unlock and move other resources. He believes immersive time is worth its face value, in which 5 minutes now are worth 5 minutes in the future; in process time, 5 minutes spent starting a process now, can equate hours put in by other people that you have delegated to in those 5 minutes, or hours lost waiting because you don’t have access to the thing you were supposed to start using those 5 minutes. He thus discusses immersive time as being less potent – a “what you see is what you get” kind of time, which does not unlock additional value, but rather accomplishes only the work you, one person, has set out to do.
And I appreciate that process time is indeed valuable – if you lead a team, and other people are waiting on your decision making, that can result in lost time, multiplied by the amount of people doing the waiting. Also, being able to be disciplined with starting and checking processes that move along in parallel is important – much more work gets accomplished like this than you can do on your own, and there is an art in being able to move one’s focus gracefully between different projects and different people’s contributions. It can also feel quite rewarding to have pass through your hands so much work getting done – much more than you could produce on your own, and gives one the slightly intoxicating feeling of being super productive.
But there is danger in there too. The danger of getting so attached to big amounts of work getting done, as not to appreciate your own working and progress on one project. When one is moving fast the balls of multiple projects, there is the danger of fire-fighting and ending up in a reactive stance, where one can only await work come to one’s self, rather than produce it.
And there is also the danger of being removed from one’s own creative slow time. Immersive time is time in which we create. And I don’t agree with Charnas that immersive time is worth only its face value – because productivity is not equal at different times – but mostly because of this one other little but magical thing: creativity. A few hours spent in immersive time with creativity can create some things which would might take you months to re-create in non-inspired production time (or that might not be achievable in a day to day just get stuff done and moving mindset). A few hours spent thinking deeply, creatively problem solving and designing good strategy can save you years of doing the same thing, progressing at it very slowly, and knocking your head on the same problems over and over, until you give up or chew them to a pulp.
So I believe strategy and creativity time are way more important than face value, and their result is not linearly proportional to the time you put in, but it depends on the quality of the solution you happen to have come up during that time.
Also, there is this other thing, called work satisfaction. Yes, you might get slightly high on how much work can be accomplished with a great team, and the team may very well end up producing without you being creative, but just starting and checking processes in time. Compare this to the wholesome pleasure of feeling you have created something yourself – and it is good. Feeling that we have personally produced meaningful work through the day is the key to wellbeing at work, and it cannot be replaced by seeing a high quantity of work getting done by a team.
So I argue against Charnas’s recommendation that you start your day with process time – starting other people and processes. Yes, you will end up perhaps with more work done by the end of the day if you do that. But I believe we should always start our days (or at least a good proportion of our days) with immersive time – so that we end up feeling that we have achieved meaningful work after a couple of hours have passed into our day already. That way, the day is done, and there is plenty of space for process work later in the day, when you might not have the same depth of thinking to achieve great strategic insights or creative mental leaps, but you still have plenty of mental stamina to supervise other people’s work or start processes which will proceed in parallel over the following days.
So, where I to build an AI agent that puts everything in its place for you, that has the capacity to set the perfect mise en place for your day, I would rather build an agent that helps you pick priorities, keeps you in the flow of your best work at the beginning of the day, actively defending you focus from anything else that might try to distract you. And I would only build an agent that connects you to all the people and processes you need to start and keep track of for early afternoon, or late in the morning 
In that way, your creative and deep thinking time would be protected, and so would your sanity and joy de vivre, by feeling that the day has passed with you creating something meaningful, something that makes you content.
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Author: Dr.Dr. Ana-Maria Olteteanu