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Adam Golfer for The Wall Street Journal

LIQUID LIGHTNING | Dave Arnold in his kitchen

ORDER A GIN AND JUICE at Booker and Dax, the new bar at the back of David Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar, and you’ll receive what looks like a wine glass filled with water. Inside it is a mixture of Tanqueray and clarified fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice that is carbonated directly (to achieve fizz without any seltzer). Dave Arnold, 40, who is Mr. Chang’s business partner at the bar, is also the drink’s “inventor.” His Son of a Peach cocktail is made with clarified canned peaches, tweaked for optimum sugar content by adding cane syrup with an electronic refractometer. Lady of the Night, a bloody mary riff, calls for horseradish distilled in a rotary evaporator. Mr. Arnold is currently the French Culinary Institute’s director of culinary technology, teaching students how to cook with sous vide machines and transglutaminase, aka “meat glue.” He grew up in Englewood, N.J., tinkering in the garage with his father, an electrical engineer, and earned his MFA in sculpture at Columbia before turning his talents to the culinary realm. Sunday afternoons find him at his New York home making dinner for his sons, the original Booker and Dax (10 and 7, respectively), and his wife, architect Jennifer Carpenter.

Mixologist and owner of David Chang’s Booker + Dax, Dave Arnold, demonstrates how he uses Bombay Sapphire East and liquid nitrogen to make his signature drink that will be featured at the upcoming Lucky Rice Festival.

I completely redid this kitchen myself. I did all the electricity, all the plumbing, all the cabinetry. My vents may or may not be illegal. And the BTUs coming out of here? Also probably illegal. I modified my Blodgett stove so the output is 40,000 BTUs, the fryer is 90,000 and the crêpe maker is 30,000. My total combined output when everything is screaming? It’s absurd.

The main problem with cooking in urban environments is a lack of adequate ventilation. In the future, I’m pretty sure more and more studies are going to say that cooking fumes are bad for you.

I built a six-foot sink with sliding cutting boards and foot pedals to control the sink. My stepfather’s hobby is surf-casting [fishing from shore], and he used to bring me really large stripers. I wanted a sink big enough that I could clean them. As for the foot pedals: Why would you ever want to touch the faucet of a sink?

We use leftovers throughout the week. I typically over-make on Sundays. It would be horrific to run out of food—basically that’s the equivalent of punching your guest in the face. Last week I cooked five chickens at Sunday dinner, then took the bones and backs and made a quick stock in my pressure cooker. With that, I made a favorite leftover dish of mine, a pasta with puréed broccoli cooked in stock. The angel hair pasta soaks up all the sauce and it becomes really creamy.

Travis Huggett

hHs Lady of the Night cocktail

My fried chicken recipe is our go-to for family dinners. Even before I started using the circulator [a temperature-controlled water bath], which I brought into the apartment five years ago, it was always a little more difficult than standard recipes. There’s something about gnawing on a bone that Jen doesn’t enjoy, so a long time ago I started completely deboning the chickens. The main problem with standard recipes is that you have to fry the chicken at a lower temperature than you fry all the other things you’re serving that day—like onion rings or french fries. Now I cook the chicken in an immersion circulator in Ziploc bags before deep-frying it at a high temperature.

In the future, the circulator is going to be a lot more prevalent in home kitchens. The issue is that we’re not used to having big troughs of water sitting about, but eventually maybe it’ll be built into sinks or cabinetry so it can be easily stored and drained.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Bubbies sauerkraut

In my fridge, I always have lots of eggs. I go through boatloads of them. I have Bubbies sauerkraut, which is a great brand, if you’re keeping track. Also a can of Surströmming, this crazy Swedish fermented fish. We snack on wine while we are cooking.

Even though I’m inherently a disorganized person, my kitchen used to be organized and my knives sharp. Now—because of the kids, the babysitter, my schedule—I don’t know where anything is.

I detest nested things that aren’t identical. I only want like-size things stacked on top of like-size things. There are different-size glass bowls in the cabinet that I never use because they are nested.

My seltzer maker was one of the first things I built in this space. I used to use a mix of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide to carbonate—nitrous makes creamier tasting bubbles—but my main nitrous tank ran out so now I just use carbon dioxide. I used to have a keg too, but since Dax was born, I haven’t had time to home brew. That was seven years ago.

During my MFA program at Columbia, I recreated St. George and the dragon—I built a kerosene-spitting machine—and the idea was that I’d fight it. Well, I miscalculated. During a test, the thing totally torched my back. I can’t take my shirt off in the sun now. It starts to itch.

I use my Krampouz French crêpe maker for pancakes, which we make two times a week. I got it at a restaurant supply store outside of Paris. That trip, Jen was sick, I was sick, we lost our wallets, it was a total nightmare—but I did bring my crêpe maker back. The surface gets up to 650 degrees quickly, so you have to put it on the lowest setting for pancakes to cook them through without burning. I like a thicker pancake.

Neil Setchfield/Alamy

Surströmming

My KitchenAid broke a long time ago because it’s poorly designed—a piece of plastic sheared off. When I was fixing it, I accidentally epoxied the cheese grater attachment onto it. I can’t get it off. So now I use it as a cheese grater.

If I could have anything else in this kitchen, I’d like a vacuum machine. I just don’t have the space.

The biggest problem with my kitchen is power management. I can’t run the air conditioner and the coffee machine at the same time.

I installed a six-gallon deep-fryer under the counter. I’ve been deep-frying a long time, since I was 10. The first thing I ever deep-fried on my own was a beignet.

As a kid, I used to make toaster-oven preparations like garlic bread with white bread and garlic powder. One time I dumped a container of garlic powder on the bread and ate it. My dad made me sit in the very back of our Gran Torino station wagon because I smelled so bad.

—Edited from an interview by Sophie Brickman

Dave’s Angel Hair Pasta With Broccoli Purée

Total Time: 20 minutes

Serves: 4-6

Adam Golfer for The Wall Street Journal

Angel hair pasta with broccoli purée

Ingredients

3 cups chicken stock

1 head broccoli, including stalk, roughly chopped (about 3 loosely packed cups)

½ cup grated Parmesan, plus more for garnish

1 clove garlic

2 egg yolks

Salt and black pepper, to taste

1 pound angel hair pasta

What To Do

1. In a small saucepan over high heat, bring stock to a boil. Add broccoli and cook until stalks are fork-tender, 8-10 minutes.

2. Transfer stock and broccoli to a blender and add cheese and garlic. Pulse until combined. Adding one egg yolk at a time, pulse until mixture is slightly thickened. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer back to a medium-size saucepan and bring to a simmer.

3. Meanwhile, cook pasta in a large pot of salted water until just pliant—about 30 seconds—then transfer immediately to the simmering sauce.

4. Finish cooking pasta in sauce over medium heat until the pasta is al dente and sauce has thickened, about 3 minutes. The resulting dish should be more creamy than brothy. Serve with extra Parmesan.

A version of this article appeared May 5, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Dave Arnold, Cocktail Wiz.

By ALINA DIZIK

Selcuk Demirel

Even after spending hours behind a computer screen, we’re often surprised by how little we get done during a workday.

Indeed, frittering time away is epidemic in the office: A 2007 survey of 2,000 workers from
Salary.com
Inc.,

a Web site that provides compensation data, found that Americans waste about 20% of their time at work; with 34.7% of those surveyed saying surfing the Internet is the biggest distraction.

An emerging crop of software now aims to make individuals more conscious of how they spend their screen time. Previously meant for free-lancers looking to keep track of billable hours, software developers are realizing that time-management applications are useful for anyone who wants to track which Web sites they visit and how much of their day is spent on certain work tasks or computer applications.

Some services record and categorize users’ computer activities—often allowing workers to classify chunks of time as either productive or unproductive. Other services operate by having users set goals for how much they’ll get done in a set period of time.

While it is easy to see how hours spent on YouTube or Facebook can crush your productivity, time-management experts say one of the biggest culprits is the constant transitioning from one computer-based task to another.

“Multi-tasking is a complete myth,” says Peter Bregman, a time-management expert and chief executive of Bregman Partners Inc., a management-consulting company. “We lose time in the switch from one task to another,” since it takes time for the brain to adjust to each project.

Tony Wright co-founder of Seattle-based RescueTime Inc., a time-tracking software company, agrees. In an October data audit, Mr. Wright found that RescueTime users switch to an instant message window 71 times per day, which means every 5.2 minutes or 11.5 times per hour. Users to the site visit an average of 57 Web sites or applications per day, he says.

To track our productivity, we tested four online services for a week each: RescueTime, Slife, Klok and ManicTime. Each site provided an eye-opening look at our workday without too much of a hassle. We also found that just knowing our activities were being watched made us a bit less likely to dawdle on non-work-related sites. But the services themselves required some upkeep—which, ironically, took time away from our work.

After signing up for a free two-week trial of RescueTime Pro (usually $5.30 per month), the software downloaded quickly and showed up on our task bar. The site recorded our activities accurately, assigned them to categories and put them into graphs. Some of the findings were surprising: When looking at the day’s graph on a random Friday, for example, we realized we spent about 10 minutes of every hour reading the news.

But we thought some of the category titles—such as “Business”—were a bit vague. “We’re still chipping away to distill this stuff into something actionable,” says RescueTime’s Mr. Wright. We liked the feature that let us designate individual sites and applications as productive or unproductive. Additionally, each time our computer was idle and we returned to our desk we were prompted to say whether our task away from the computer was work related, like a phone call, or something that shouldn’t be recorded, like a trip to the fridge for a snack.

Klok doesn’t automatically track what you do on the computer (so no Internet connection is required). Instead, it asks users to set tasks for themselves throughout the day to help manage projects. Then users note when they start and stop each project, making it easy to compare your goals to reality. One morning, for example, we saw that a writing assignment took 3½-hours instead of the two we thought it should. We also realized we did far fewer tasks than anticipated each day.

Overall, the service helped us get more tasks done because setting goals required us to think through how we would build our days’ work. Tasks can be broken up into subcategories, making larger projects seem more manageable. But it was a bit of a pain to remember to notify the service every time we stopped and started a task. And even when we did make sure to mark our stop time, the service sometimes didn’t register it, making our data inaccurate. Rob McKeown, co-founder of Mcgraphix Inc., which developed Klok, says this issue will be resolved in the next version.

Next up was Slife. The service costs $5 per month, but a 30-day trial is free. To sign up for the trial, however, we had to provide a credit-card number. (A redesign will soon enable users to log on without one, says Edison Thomaz founder of Atlanta-based Slife Labs LLC.) After a quick download, we could see an icon on our task bar. Clicking on the icon took us to various time-management graphs, which were easy to read. The software lets users customize their own categories, such as news or research. You can also add labels to specify your activity even further, such as detailing what kind of research is being done.

During one particularly unproductive day, the service showed us that we spent 22 minutes on Twitter, 40 minutes on Facebook and almost three hours on email. There was also a “private” mode that turned the tracking function off, allowing us to browse frivolous stuff guilt-free.

One big headache was that we were often randomly bounced off the Slife service, causing it to miss some of our activities and requiring us to repeatedly log in. (Mr. Thomaz says Slife is working on fixing the problem.)

ManicTime, a desktop program that only runs on Windows systems, was next. Our computer usage was tracked with line and bar graphs; we could color code activities and tags to better understand how we spent our time. That made it clear that email was our biggest time waster. (Though the service doesn’t distinguish between work and non-work related emails.)

One nice feature: The service spit out a summary showing what percentage of our total time was spent with each application (like a Microsoft Word document) or Web site. The graphs also showed when our computer was idle, which helped us see how many little breaks we tend to take throughout the day.

All in all, the services really helped us get a handle on how we spend our work time. And having a written account of where our minutes went pushed us to modify our work habits—and get more done. The guilt element was motivating, too: Just knowing that the length of our Facebook session was going to be recorded made us think twice about lingering

Write to Alina Dizik at alina.dizik@dowjones.com

Virginia Commonwealth will leave the Colonial Athletic Association and join the Atlantic 10 Conference effective July 1. The school is moving to attract better student-athletes and raise its public profile, school president Michael Rao said. Coach Shaka Smart (above left) and the Rams reached the men’s basketball Final Four in 2011 and the NCAA tournament’s round of 32 this year. Under CAA rules, the school will forfeit $5 million in tournament revenue for leaving. VCU also owes a $250,000 exit fee.

—Rachel Bachman

Oddsmakers Expect Hoosiers Back on Top

Indiana’s return from the backwater of college basketball is complete by yet another metric: Las Vegas odds. The online sports book Bovada has pegged the resurgent Hoosiers as the 7-1 favorites to win next year’s NCAA tournament. Indiana advanced to the Sweet 16 last season and finished 27-9.

With a top-10 recruiting class joining sophomore center Cody Zeller and an experienced nucleus, coach Tom Crean’s team is back among the sport’s elite. Indiana’s top competition next season includes Louisville (8-1) and defending national champion Kentucky (10-1).

—
Ben Cohen

Obama Bends the Truth About David Beckham

President Barack Obama welcomed the Los Angeles Galaxy to the White House on Tuesday to celebrate their third Major League Soccer Cup. The president said that the star-studded team, led by David Beckham, Landon Donovan and Robbie Keane, are the “Miami Heat of soccer.” Obama joked that the 37-year-old Beckham was “a young up-and comer” and noted Donovan “has done more for American soccer than just about anybody.”

—Associated Press

A version of this article appeared May 16, 2012, on page D8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Heard on the Field.

Welcome to the executive suite. But beware: Your smallest acts can cause big consequences.

Consider Linda Parker Hudson, promoted last fall to run the U.S. arm of BAE Systems

PLC, a global defense giant.

She told her top lieutenants that she expected “rapid responses” to email around the clock. To her surprise, several started sleeping beside their beeping BlackBerry so they could answer her 3 a.m. messages right away.

Ms. Hudson says she repeatedly reassured these colleagues that they could sleep at night and tried to lessen her nocturnal BlackBerry use. But “it was probably a few months before we all got used to each other,” she concedes.

BAE Systems

Linda Parker Hudson of BAE Systems

Ms. Hudson experienced “executive amplification,” a widespread phenomenon that can significantly affect your career. When you land a senior post, staffers constantly will scrutinize — and possibly misconstrue – your deeds, dress and words.

Yet power makes you “less aware that your behavior matters,” cautions Adam Galinsky, a professor of organizational behavior at Northwestern University’s business school. “That can be a career killer by demoralizing your troops.” Even lack of eye contact with them as you walk down the hall conveys your disapproval, risking alienation.

Amplification also can work to your advantage because effective, small moves often improve employee motivation. You must recognize that “leadership is a role, and you are always on,” says Gary Bradt, an executive coach in Summerfield, N.C. “Make sure you send the messages that you want to send.”

Ms. Hudson first saw the downside of the amplifier effect when she became the first female division president for General Dynamics Corp.

in 1999. During her first week, she wore a new scarf tied in a fancy bow. The next day, she ran into more than a dozen women there wearing scarves tied the same way.

Being watched so closely frightened Ms. Hudson. “I wasn’t accustomed to being the center of attention,” the 60-year-old executive recalls. “I felt like I was up on a billboard.”

She soon found herself closely scrutinized again. Touring a division factory months later, Ms. Hudson noticed flyers posted everywhere. They displayed her photo and list of leadership expectations from a recent management team speech.

Thanks to the unanticipated flyers, Ms. Hudson says she realized that amplification represents a potentially positive tool. “You can change employee behavior by subtle changes in your behavior,” she explains.

Anton Rabie, president and co-chief executive of Spin Master Ltd., a toy maker, uses a minor symbolic gesture to amplify his deep commitment to taking risks. He mounts failed Spin Master products and misguided mock-ups on a wall of his Toronto office.

“Each one has a lesson that we should remember,” observes Mr. Rabie, who launched the manufacturer with two classmates in 1994. Staffers viewing his flop-filled wall know “it’s okay to make mistakes,” he continues. “It’s like walking the talk.”

You may also reap benefits from executive amplification by seeking frequent feedback – and making needed corrections. Easier said than done, however.

“As you rise in the ranks, people stop telling you what they should tell you,” notes Richard A. Davis, a partner at RHR International, an executive-coaching firm, and author of the new book. “The Intangibles of Leadership.”

He advocates creating a personal board of directors to help identify your blind spots. “They have to know you and the people around you,” but work elsewhere than your employer, Dr. Davis recommends.

A performance review known as 360-degree feedback persuaded a newly promoted executive at a multinational apparel concern to alter her misinterpreted appearance, according to Rosemarie Fiorilli, a New York executive coach who advised her this year. The 360-degree process involves anonymous input from peers, subordinates and superiors.

The executive wore designer duds, including luxury-brand jewelry, at a workplace that favors business casual dress, Ms. Fiorilli says.

During 360-degree interviews, co-workers said, “She’s trying to be better than us,” the coach recollects. “She was the only one who didn’t know this was bothering people.”

Ms. Fiorilli says she warned the executive that the amplified impact of her luxurious look was hurting her group’s cohesiveness. The woman “toned it down immediately,” the coach adds. “Her boss said other people had noticed and remarked favorably.”

An associate’s frank feedback taught Tim Rice a different amplification lesson. While chief operating officer of Moses Cone Health System in Greensboro, N.C., he visited a friend seated in a chair two days after she underwent open-heart surgery at one of its five hospitals.

Mr. Rice teased her nurse for leaving the woman “in this chair all day long” because the patient looked tired. His joke devastated the nurse, “and she cried afterward,” the nursing director told Mr. Rice.

He later apologized to the nurse and in front of nearly 150 colleagues, praised the nursing director’s candor. Actually, “I was really afraid to come tell you,” she replied.

Mr. Rice says he concluded that his high-level title intimidated subordinates, and he should avoid sarcasm “because everything we do is amplified.” He took charge of Moses Cone in 2004. But “I am probably not as open and free and goofy as I have been in the past.”

At the same time, Mr. Rice regularly encourages his team members to suggest ways that he might lead the health-care system better. “I always say, ‘Who is going to tell the CEO that his fly is unzipped?”’

Write to Joann S. Lublin at joann.lublin@wsj.com