Happy Friday!

HelloFresh

About a month ago, my wife was getting ready to cook one of our HelloFresh meals when she was interrupted by a Facebook message. Earlier, she had seen a little bookshelf for sale on Marketplace that could help organize our daughter’s doll accessories. The message was from the seller: he would meet her in a few minutes if she still wanted to buy it.

I was working on a project—likely that week’s newsletter, actually!—but it wasn’t urgent. I said I would chop the veggies and get the various pots, pans, and cooking stones ready for her when she got back.

So she left and I got to chopping. When I finished, I organized all the remaining ingredients and cookware so she would be able to dive right in when she returned. As I spread the potato wedges on the stone, my wife called and said there had been a miscommunication and the seller would be a few minutes longer.

No problem. I pre-heated the oven, mixed together the aioli, and seasoned the potatoes. Then I reorganized everything again so she could pick up where I left off.

Shortly thereafter, she messaged that she needed to meet him somewhere else because he had gotten confused which buyer was picking up what and where he was supposed to meet them.

All right then. I put the potatoes in the oven, caramelized the onions, formed and cooked the burger patties, toasted the brioche buns, and by the time my wife was home with the bookshelf, dinner was done.

What did I learn?

Turns out, that was one of the easiest meals I’ve ever cooked.

After every step in the recipe, I reset the station as though someone else would be picking up from there. And ultimately someone did—but it was me!

One of my favorite productivity books is Work Clean, and my HelloFresh story is about as on-the-nose as it gets for mise-en-place—which originated as cooking terminology and roughly means “everything in its place.” I was resetting my mise-en-place after every step, and the work was simpler as a result.

My long-time readers (4 months and going strong!) know that one of my productivity metaphors is “communication between your past, present, and future self.” If you set your intentions and communicate them to yourself in a predictable, standardized way, you’ll accomplish a lot more of the work that’s important to you.

My start-and-stop meal prep teaches a similar lesson: when all the pieces are in place, laid out so clearly that someone else could pick up from where you left off, you will do better, more efficient work. The extra time you invest when you organize between steps pays off in an easier, more effective, more relaxed process.

💡Work like you’re delegating—to yourself 💡

👆That’s your weekend upgrade.

A lawyer friend of mine lost her father unexpectedly a few years ago, and learned first hand—and through watching her mother struggle—how hopeless it can feel trying to sift through the details of someone’s life. The passwords, the financial accounts, the insurance. Every day brought more new challenges than she and her mother knew what to do with.

Since my friend works in estate law, she now provides her clients a binder as part of her will-preparation service. The binder provides prompts for every little detail their family or friends must know if something were to happen to them, and space for the relevant documentation. Because the last thing you want to do is leave your family both grieving and at a loss for what to do next.

The analogy is depressing, but the lesson is vivid: If you’re delegating something to someone—and death is the ultimate delegation—make it so clear and well organized that anyone could pick it up and understand how to proceed.

Deferring is self-delegation

When you capture something in your Inbox—a task, let’s say—you later have to decide what to do with it. One option is adding that task to an existing project, or creating an entirely new project around it. Moving the task to a project is called “deferring” it: setting it up so it surfaces to you at the right time in the future.

Your upgrade for this weekend is to frame deferring as “delegating to yourself.” Future You will never understand the task or project as well as you expect. To overcome that, be as clear about the next steps as you would if you were listing them for someone else. Provide context, include relevant materials, state goals, define success, anticipate outcomes and obstacles. Future You will thank you—and get a lot more work accomplished, too.

How can Tools for Thought help?

If you’re new to the Weekend Upgrade newsletter, I explore how processes can be created in Tools for Thought (TfTs). TfTs are apps optimized for linking your ideas, thoughts, notes, etc.—apps like Roam Research, Amplenote, Logseq, Obsidian, and Craft.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen calls tasks or ideas that we haven’t captured in our system “open loops,” and he warns that open loops tie up our mental RAM. When you delegate to yourself, your goal is to create a “savepoint” that keeps the loop open in your system but allows you to close the loop in your mind.

To do this, you need a reliable shutdown routine that you run every time you leave a work session. The shutdown routine should create a bridge from your current work session into the next. It will provide Future You clear next steps, along with the context and materials you need to quickly pick up where you left off and get back into the work. Note the similarity to how I repeatedly—though unwittingly!—delegated the next steps of our HelloFresh meal to myself.

Imagine for a moment that you only work with paper documents. Nothing digital at all. The shutdown routine might look something like this:

1. Paperclip the relevant documents into logical groupings,
2. Place them all into a folder,
3. Put the folder where you can easily get it the next time you need it,
4. Add the project’s next action to your task list for tomorrow—or next week, next month, whatever.

Tools for Thought allow you to leave digital work tied up with a neat little bow just as easily as you could do with a physical folder.

Closing mental loops

In Weekend Upgrade 3, I encouraged you to never leave a work session without defining what’s next. This concept is similar, though with slightly different focus.

Our goal is digital mise-en-place—everything in its place. We need to know where to look to find the savepoints of our open loops, and how to engage with them to dive back into our work.

When I create a savepoint for an open loop in my system, I use a SmartBlock in Roam Research. But SmartBlocks are not required: you can do it manually too, and adapt the process to whatever TfT you prefer.

To safely store an open loop in a TfT, you need:

1. References to the [[project]], [[people]], [[topics]], etc., it’s associated with,
2. A tag that defines it as an Open Loop,
3. A statement of what you intend to do next,
4. Links to the relevant materials needed to pick the work back up—your “digital paperclip.”

In Roam, that might look something like this:

• [[Project reference]] [[Joe Schmoe]] #[[open loop]]
  • What do I want to do next?
    • text about what I want to do next
  • Relevant materials
    • link to one thing
    • link to another
    • …

This creates several entry points to access where you left off. You could pick up your work on the project page and find “open loop” in the backlinks. Or you could query “open loop”—by itself or connected to a specific date—and identify which projects have loops open. And of course you could flesh this out further if you like, with additional relevant references as entry points.

While the exact implementation will vary based on your TfT of choice, if you cover the bases listed above, you’ll have safely saved your progress and you can let go of it in your mind. You’ll be able to pick up from there as easily as I dove into each step of our dinner prep.

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Look back over this past week and identify your open loops. Then spend a few moments of mise-en-place with each. Add references, text, next steps, links to materials, and so forth, to make it easier for you to pick up the work in the future.

If you save these open loops in your system and close them in your mind, you’ll have a much more pleasant and relaxed weekend, and you’ll get back into your work quickly and easily on Monday.

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

Cook your meals like you expect my wife could show up at any time to finish them.

R.J.
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