Mise-en-Place for Knowledge Workers: 6 Practices for Working Clean
Other skilled trades – from carpenters to welders to nurses to pilots – have been around long enough and are repeatable enough that the best practices are widely understood.
How to frame a door, how to weld a seam, how to prepare an IV, how to prepare for landing – these tasks aren’t a mystery. Other professions have developed training over time to teach every novice how to master them.
But the same isn’t true of most knowledge workers. We receive precious little training in how to “do” knowledge work. There is no class in college on how to triage your email inbox, manage your agenda, or organize your computer files. And the situation doesn’t improve when we enter the workforce: most employers don’t teach us how to formulate goals, document our knowledge, or automate our most common tasks.
We spend tens of thousands of dollars on our education, plus thousands of hours learning specialized skills. Yet so little time and effort is spent mastering the most fundamental skill of all: how to manage our work.
