Friends, one thing I hear many times from people (mostly women) is the constant struggle for time management – and for balancing work and life needs without prioritising one over the other.
Having been a highly effective project manager for most of my career – it made sense for me to have top notch time management practices at home. So here is a hack that I want to share with you.
So, every Sunday, my husband and I spend 15 minutes planning what the family will eat the entire week.
We have a list of all the dishes we like to eat, then based on produce availability and family preferences, we plan the meals.
The pain point isn’t the cooking, it’s the deciding what to eat day by day.
This is the most effective thing you can do to better manage your time.
We take into account the following:
- 1 member is a vegetarian (me).
- All others love meat.
- At least 2 members of the family have lunch at home each day (hybrid working benefit).
- We want to minimise cooking time during the week.
- We take advantage of Sundays to cook complicated meals. The slow cooker is a huge time saving device.
- On Sunday, we plan the entire week’s meals, then go to the shops to purchase ingredients.
- For the first and second year of Covid, my family went full vegetarian. This year, we are going through a meat phase (except for me).
Personally, I don’t like how much meat my family eats – but this is a choice they have made (with which I comply by cooking delicious food). Following is an example of our weekly meal planning. There is often a lot of leftovers – which means sometimes for 1-2 nights we don’t need to cook at all.
If you have growing teenagers – this meal plan is ideal because it is protein heavy.
What hacks do you have? Actually, do you do slow cooking to save time?
Hey Sandy – would you be able to clarify what you meant, please?