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Comment by bern4444 | Hacker News Reader

Mise En Place is very helpful as anyone who begins to practice it can attest.

The other critical part of cooking (which IMO applies to other jobs, roles etc) is cleaning as you go - one of the first things taught in cooking school.

I personally hate cleaning up after I finish eating so I try and clean and put everything away before I sit down.

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Both principles indeed apply to all sorts of jobs!

Cleaning as you go also reduces variability and total time spent. Cleaning naturally consumes short spans of otherwise-useless idle time between tasks. It also enables pipelining of multiple jobs. I also prefer to clean up before eating, and that usually takes just enough time for the meal to cool down to the right temperature if I was cleaning as I go.

I have a strong desire to refactor code as I read it. I tend to avoid this behavior because (a) most codebases are in need of so much cleanup, and (b) I like to keep commits small and topical. Perhaps I should re-evaluate how I weight these factors.

I spent a few years working in a kitchen, and those are the two items I took away myself - before I start cooking I clear out the dish rack, and then I have a sink full of soap and water and most of the chopping is done before I even turn on the stove-top.

Cleaning as you go also probably has the same impact as mise en place--driving down process variability. Less things that can get in your way.

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