Everything I know about completing a project I learned from working in kitchens

A few years back, I had a manager who had worked for many years as an executive chef. I saw the way his brain worked and thought, “I want to do that” – so I signed up for a summer at cooking school and took a job at a neighbourhood pub. I bought knives. I read Kitchen Confidential.

I have no special talent or passion for cooking, and I’ll never be a great chef. It’s the transferable stuff that gets me going. The adrenaline-fueled planning, the minute-to-minute priority management, the demand to keep standards up and move fast under pressure. When you face a crowd of tipsy concertgoers who need an assortment of steaks, burgers, salads and customized pastas in the next 20 minutes, there’s only one thing standing in your way: successful project management. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned.

1. You’re only as good as what you can do on time and at scale.

It’s satisfying to make yourself a great meal. For me it’s homemade pasta, with a creamy sauce and plenty of cheese. I find it relaxing to roll out the dough, with the sizzle of onions and a good Spotify playlist in the background.

But it takes different skills to make 30, 40, or 100 great meals while the orders roll in, and paying customers get hungrier at their tables.

The best restaurant cooks aren’t necessarily the best home cooks, and many home cooks are hopeless in a professional kitchen. In any setting, you’re only as good as what you can do at the appropriate scale and with acceptable timing – whether it’s a high school cafeteria, a 3-star restaurant, or dinner for one on a lazy afternoon.

2. The time you spend on a task must stay proportionate to its value.

Have you ever iced a cake? I don’t mean anything elaborate – just a basic, presentable coat of icing on a layered cake. For those of us caught between the desire for perfection and a lack of cake-decorating experience, a simple cake is a clever snare. It will suck you in forever. The icing will never be perfectly even, the layers will never be perfectly flat. And the more you try to fix it, the worse it gets.

In the cafe where I work, some cakes are special orders, and might be worth a minor obsession. They’re going out into the world, making someone’s special day. But other cakes are for sale off the counter. They’ll march to the front lines for immediate butchering at $3.95 a slice. If you spend an extra 40 minutes making it perfect, your labour has eaten the profit.

The math is mostly easy, but it gets away from us all the time. Your time costs money. The time you spend must always stay proportionate to the task’s eventual value.

3. Learn to work better without getting slower. Learn to work faster without getting worse.

This one’s easy to understand, but never ends. It’s the basic formula for efficiency – a lifelong goal. It’s easy to think that a job well done means taking your time, or that rushed work has to be sloppy. But if you actually want to improve, then time and quality can’t be a zero-sum game.

There are two ways to get more value out of your own task-based, paid labour. Do it better, without slowing down. Or do it faster, without f%#king it up.

4. Perfection has diminishing returns.

I love casual elegance in a plate of food. I love the details that say “Oh, this? I just threw it together” – like spending three hours in the bathroom to achieve the perfect bedhead. I look at a hamburger, ready to serve, and wonder whether the second tomato slice would look better 6 mm to the left.

Unfortunately, hamburgers get cold. People get hungrier, too. You have a finite, expected time-frame in which to complete a project. After that, the longer you spend on those finishing touches, the less anyone will care about them. The quest for perfection is time-sensitive. While you’re spending three hours on that perfect bedhead…you might just miss your date.

Thanks for reading! You can find more of my articles at markprince.ca/blog