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There's a book by Dan Charnas called "Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind" that does a great job of explaining the system of mise en place beyond just setup and precutting vegetables. My favorite takeaway that has actually helped my organization in practice has been to leave a project/code base in a clean state after working on it. Sounds obvious but writing checklists for tests, documentation, setup for the next person, etc. has been really helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/Work-Clean-life-changing-mise-en-plac...



Yes, this is an excellent book. About 1/3 of the people where I work read it. The difference between those who did and those who didn’t is stark.

A good “add-on” read to this is Essentialism. I felt like it complemented Working Clean very well.

https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg...


I deliberately leave a project in a broken state when I am done for the day (e.g. a broken test) if I am coming back to it tomorrow.

The reason is that it’s very easy to get started again - the test is broken, so the next task is to fix the test.




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