Ah, December. Like so many years before, many of us are looking forward to 2017 with eager eyes. Let's put the nightmare of the 2016 election cycle behind us. Let's move past the grief of many talented people who died this year. Let's start fresh to make the new year a better one. #NewYearsResolutions, and all that.

My 2016 has certainly been an interesting one: I packed up my apartment, spent 7 months living nomadically through the U.S. and Europe, and managed to curate a wonderful collection of clients whose work I love doing. Yes, I was heartbroken about the election. Yes, I grieved for deaths in the past year. Yes – I'm ready for 2017.

Part of what makes me excited about 2017 is the opportunity to set new habits. I've been a New Years Resolution geek since childhood, and have a reasonable success record with them (50+%). I relish the challenge of using an arbitrary day (January 1st) as the chance to wholly overcommit to my goals for the coming year.

I haven't nailed down my resolutions and unresolutions* for 2017 yet, as I'm sure many of you are still contemplating your hopes, dreams, and goals for the coming year. Before you get too far down the rabbit hole of trying to transform your whole life, let me propose a simple, daily habit that can help you achieve every other resolution you set.

Mise en place.

I first learned about the mise en place concept while working for Dyne, a food-tech startup in Seattle. Our small team was comprised of food-loving cooks and chefs, and one day a colleague mentioned the term off-hand. I later encountered it in a long-overdue reading of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.

In short, mise en place translates directly from French as "everything in its place." I personally translate it as "Everything in its Right Place," a freaking amazing song by Radiohead off their album Kid A.

For chefs, mise en place is a habit, art, and daily act wherein they prepare their workspace for the shift ahead. They prep all the ingredients, clean and arrange their tools, and mentally commit to the quality of work they will produce. The featured photo of this post (above) is a great example of a proper mise en place.

You may be wondering how this translates to a "game changing productivity habit" you can apply to your day and new year – I didn't drag you in with a click-baity headline, I promise.

While the physical act of mise en place in the kitchen requires assembling ingredients and arranging tools, you can do the same for any work. Applying the mise en place concept to your daily life means creating a series of tasks that you do each day to prepare yourself mentally for the day.

Here's my mise en place:

I use Evernote to manage my mise en place. It's a series of tasks I do every day (those titled "Calendar," "Evernote," "Trello," and "Email") plus additional tasks I do each week. Every day, I work my way from the top of the list to the bottom, completing each task. As a chef conducts their mise en place before starting to prepare a dish, my mise en place is the first thing I do each work day.

By doing the same tasks each day and each week, I have trained my mind to ensure all the i's and t's are taken care of before launching into the work ahead of me. I know exactly the path I must walk – which tasks I will do, at what time, and which emails require a reply. I am mentally ready to tackle the challenges ahead, and if I foresee an insurmountable issue during my mise en place, I can adjust my daily schedule before it even starts.

As you can see, my mise en place is tailored to my work as a freelancer. I use it to make sure my schedule of batched tasks makes sense, and that high priority clients hear from me in a timely fashion. Your mise en place will look different, depending on the work you do.

Take time now, in what remains of December, to identify your daily maintenance and productivity tasks. What do you do every morning when you arrive at the office. How could you consolidate these into a short, 10-20 minute window that you use to start your day? Mise en place is the practice which helps you focus and prepare for a productive day ahead. As a daily task, it helps you chip away at goals, identify what's working in your daily schedule, and make adjustments so that those neglected New Years Resolutions might actually happen next year.

I'd love to hear if you have a similar daily practice. Please share in the comments!

*Starting in 2016, I made "unresolutions" in addition to resolutions. These were things I wanted to remove or minimize in my life.



