Take a less laundry vacation

 "Less but better" is a phrase that comes from Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. It does take some discipline and effort to become an essentialist when it comes to laundry. This is because in most cases, less (but better) laundry means both reducing what you have and creating habits around laundry. Let's talk about reducing what we have for a second here. 

Here's the thing: back in the day (for hundreds of years up until the washing machine was invented), people had much less clothing and linens, and what they did have took way more effort to maintain. Cloth was expensive and labor intensive to produce in the first place. People had maybe two or three sets of clothing. Laundry work took two days of hard labor every week if you did it yourself. "Monday wash day, Tuesday Ironing" was an ancient weekly routine. If you didn't do it yourself, you'd hire the washer woman or other professional launderers to do it for you--people made laundry their career. 

The washing machine changed a lot about home lifestyle.

Imagine if those people from years ago had a washing machine. A middle class family of four could probably could have washed everything they owned in a few loads, and modern fabrics often make ironing unnecessary at all. An entire two day's labor could have been turned into half a day's work. 

So why is laundry so hard for us now?

We just have a lot more stuff then they did back then. Cheaper clothing and linens make it easier for us to have far more of everything that goes through the laundry.

So one way to simplify the laundry is to reduce the inventory. 

I'm not saying it's time to get rid of lots of your clothes and linens now, but for the sake of gaining some time in the short term, try an experiment. Try taking a less laundry vacation.

Act as if you are packing for a two-week trip involving all your everyday activities: daily work wear, outings, church, exercise, sports, or whatever activities are in the regular routine. Try to avoid packing any items needing dry cleaning or special treatment in the laundry. You want to pack light but still have everything you'd need in clothing, bedding, and towels for both the kitchen and the bathroom. Start with a list or two in your BOPO if it's helpful. Then you can even get out some suitcases and bags and pack what you want to take on your "vacation," or you can just make piles of what you wrote on your lists. But go ahead and actually sort out your vacation items from the rest.

Anything not packed for vacation then gets set aside--and by that I mean removed from normal circulation. Bag it in bags, put it in boxes, and get it out of your everyday closets and drawers. Just stash your extras somewhere out of the way for now. Don't get rid of these piles. Just stash them. There may be a lot of stuff to empty out of drawer and closets and set aside. Rest assured that having these items gathered up is actually going to help you get a head start in Unit 3. 

This is a lot of packing. It's ok for it to take a few days. In the process of all this packing, feel free to set aside anything you come across that is what Dana K White calls a "duh donation"--something you don't have to think twice about getting rid of. Hopefully you've got your sorting station set up from doing the kitchen still and can just add donations to your donation pile. If you find trash (and you probably will), you know what to do with it. 

Once you've done that, you've arrived at your laundry vacation destination. Unpack you vacation bags (or piles) into your considerably more empty closets, drawers, and linen closets.

Try living with just what you packed for your vacation for the next two weeks. When it is time to wash a load, follow this laundry vacation plan:

Gather all the laundry that needs to be cleaned, including any bedding, towels, etc.

If you're sure about the colorfastness of your pile, you don't even have to sort the laundry into whites and colors. Just load up the machine, add the soap, and run on cold. 

If you are worried about whites coming out slightly tinged with color, go ahead and sort but only into two piles: whites and colors. Then run your whites separately. While it isn't necessary to run white laundry on hot, if you have any concerns with dust mites, bed bugs, or other shenanigans going on, by all means run your whites on hot, eliminate abominations, and be at peace. Watch out though. Running colors on a hot cycle can sometimes affect the colors. 

Line dry or use the dryer or whatever is best in your situation.

When it's time to fold and hang up the clean laundry, start by hanging up any items that should be hung. Then skip folding. 

Yes. I said it. Don't fold the other laundry at all. 

Put your remaining laundry unfolded into the drawers or containers where it belongs. If stuff doesn't fit without folding, go ahead and fold enough to make it fit. But only just enough to make it fit.

Iron only if you absolutely cannot avoid it.

This is vacation, OK? It's only for two weeks. 

After two weeks, evaluate. Did the laundry vacation reduce the time and effort involved in doing the laundry? How much of the vacation lifestyle makes sense to make a permanent part of your laundry lifestyle?

You may decide that you are ok with not folding clothes ever again. Not only is that OK, that's fantastic. As long as your clothes and linens come out looking presentable, there's no rule saying you have to fold them to store them. Hooray! To be completely honest, I have helped people set up laundry storage systems that have hampers for both dirty laundry and clean laundry--so they never even have to put their clean clothes in drawers or on hangers at all if that's just too much for them to do (cuz they're just too lazy or cuz they really don't have the capacity to put stuff away). These types of "no fold" system can actually reduce your dirty laundry piles because the kids--and others--find it just as easy to put their clean laundry in the clean hamper as in the dirty one where they used to hide the clean clothes they didn't want to put away...

However, if you do decide though that folding really helps your clean laundry storage situation, try adopting the Konmari folding method for joyful folding which you can learn here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjkmqbJTLBM. Marie Kondo also shares folding techniques in her book, Spark Joy.

Before you go digging back into all the stuff you put away during your laundry vacation, get real with yourself: how much of that stuff did you actually miss? Consider leaving these items put away until we approach them again during the next unit: Serious Purging Party.

There's nothing like a vacation to help you gain perspective on life . . . and laundry.

Recognizing Success in Your Roles

It's all well and good to have thought through our roles and defined our success. But it will mean little if we don't take time to recognize success when we achieve it. 

One effective way to recognize our successes is to journal regularly about them. Another way is to enlist a cheerleader. Maybe not the screaming, dancing, pom-pom waving kind, but pretty close.

Success Journaling

Journaling can be tough. It’s just “one more thing.” But it is one of the things that will have a bigger impact. It’s what I like to call a “high-leverage activity.”

The ideal is to journal every day. But if you have a hard time making time for daily journaling, give yourself permission to do it just a few times a week, or even once a week. Even a little bit on a regular basis is better than nothing at all. 

Another way to make journaling more achievable is to limit your entries. One of the best journals we have ever kept in our family was a one-sentence journal in which we wrote one, maybe two sentences a day. It seemed small, but it’s amazing how much was captured in just a few sentences, and how deeply meaningful it is now to look back on those entries. 

Something that can make the journaling experience more useful and meaningful is to focus on writing about key roles. Lately, I have been experimenting with writing one or two sentences about each of my top four or five roles every day. As I have done this, I have become more aware of what I am doing well (successes) and important areas where I need to improve. 

One of the best ways to be successful and recognize your success in any role is to journal about it. The role of homemaker and many of the roles surrounding it (such as family roles) is very hard to evaluate for success if we don’t take time to clarify our purpose (as we did in previous lessons) and then stop to recognize when we do make progress and do achieve our goals. While you won’t get a raise, a bonus, a promotion, or anything like that in the homemaking career, your journal can give you the pat on the back you need by helping you stop to recognize what is going well, and by reminding you of where you have been and how far you have come.

Journaling is a big part of personal organization because it involves reflecting on and learning from your best teachers: yourself and God. 

If you’re like me, though, you may need some additional motivation and some better ideas to help you believe in journaling enough to make the effort. So here are two excellent articles on the subject:

If you don’t have time to read this whole really cool article, just read the headings. Even that much will be motivating: https://www.success.com/blog/28-ways-keeping-a-daily-journal-could-change-your-life

Ideas for simplifying journaling and reasons why you should journal:

https://gregmckeown.com/blog/one-thing-productive-people-reaching-phones/

A classic gospel perspective on journaling:

https://www.lds.org/new-era/2003/02/the-angels-may-quote-from-it?lang=eng

For this article, just replace “business” with the role of your choice (for example, replace “business owners” with “parents” or “homemakers”): https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/how-journaling-is-important-to-success.html

Cheerleader Enlisting

My husband does a great job at voluntarily commenting on my homemaking success from time to time. His ability to recognize and express appreciation for my efforts is tremendously valuable to me and to our relationship. Having someone who sees my efforts, benefits from them, and says thank you really helps me recognize my success. Thank you Jared for doing that for me.

Jared frequently does this on his own because he's that wonderful. But sometimes, I need a "go you" and he doesn't know it. Does this mean he's insensitive? No. It just means he can't read my mind. I have learned that it's ok to ask him for positive feedback sometimes, and he is happy to oblige. It's ok to cue the cheer squad.

My point is, you can own how important and helpful external recognition is to you. And you can take steps to make sure you get that recognition. If it's helpful to you, ask someone sympathetic to be part of your homemaking cheer team, and return the favor. That's what friends are for. 

Sometimes I ask God how I'm doing. I am often amazed at how encouraged I feel when I do this.  God is a great person to have on the cheer team.

Defining Success in Your Roles

Before you can change anything about your life, you have to change your thinking. This lesson is aimed at helping us get started on changing the way we think about our life by clarifying what is most important to us. In clarifying what is most important, you’ll also identify your own way to measure success in your role as a homemaker. Knowing what success looks like for you as a homemaker will help you find fulfillment in a career that doesn’t have grades, raises, promotions, or other common workplace accolades. You will be able to recognize and achieve your own success, even (and especially) on those tough days on the job.

The following assignment may take a while to complete. Possibly, it may take as long as a week.

Assignment: Read and do what is recommended in this blog post. I recommend writing in your BOPO. As you read and follow what is recommended, please keep the following in mind:

When you write your roles, consider including “individual” and “homemaker” in your list.

When you write your purpose in each role, write in terms of what you can control. You can always control your own actions and attitudes. You can't control others’ actions and attitudes, but you can influence others with your behavior. 

For example, when I first did this activity a few years ago, in my role as wife, I wrote purposes such as “I will make Jared feel loved and happy.” News flash! I can never be successful in that purpose. I can't make Jared happy. Happiness is Jared's choice. Even though we may say things like “that makes me happy,” in reality, I can never make anyone feel or do anything (maybe with the exception of physical I pain through to brute force, but that's not where I'm going with this). I can influence though. So my revised purpose statement said things like “I look for ways to lighten Jared's load. I express my love for him in words and actions.” 

Notice the difference in these statements. The first statements focused on outcomes that, while they may be within my influence, are actually outside my control, and I cannot fairly measure success by standards outside my control. The second, by contrast, stated things that I can do, no matter what Jared’s choices or responses may be. It is much more empowering to state my purpose in terms that are within my control.

It's also empowering to phrase these objectives in active voice and present tense rather than passive voice or in the future tense. Instead of “my husband will be happy because of XYZ thing I do,” say “I promote my husband's happiness by doing XYZ.” This slight adjustment in phrasing will make a positive difference in how you think about your key roles, and how successful you feel in these roles. 

Once you have your roles and goals defined, you will know what success looks like for you. You may not get your chores all done; you may burn dinner; but if you’re filling your roles and meeting your goals in the ways that you have identified, you’re succeeding in what really matters to you. 

So, grab your BOPO and get started here!

Going from Paid Professional to Career Homemaker

Transitioning from a money-making career to a homemaking career was surprisingly hard for me. I am still adjusting to this transition, but I have learned a few things that have made the transition easier, and that’s what I want to share. 

I have a master’s degree in English and I took my time getting it. I worked on and off through college at a variety of jobs, and then after graduating began a career as a technical writer and editor for a civil engineering firm. I was doing fine. My plan was to work for a while, build my resume and experience, then possibly get a job as an adjunct faculty member at a local university and teach while continuing to dabble in technical and business writing. 

But that was all “plan B.” Even while pursuing my degrees, my deepest wish and my “plan A” was to get married, start a family, and be a stay-at-home mom. I did get married, and about a year into my tech writing job, we found out we were having a baby. 

I was so happy. Finally, my dreams of pursuing a homemaking career were going to happen. But I was also surprised at how emotional I felt about leaving my job, even though quitting my job and devoting myself to homemaking and family building was what I truly wanted. I was also surprised at how hard being a stay at home mom turned out to be--not because the tasks of taking care of the home and family were so challenging (even though they were!) but because it was so challenging to find the kind of fulfillment and appreciation that I had experienced in my money-making career. It was easy to feel exhausted at the end of a day’s hard homemaking work, look back on the day, and feel like a failure instead of a success.

I tried a lot of things to help find fulfillment in my new career as a homemaker, and while some things helped, the day-to-day was not as happy as I had hoped. 

Since then, I have learned what I was doing wrong: I was trying to apply the measures of success in a money-making career (that we are taught to value and appreciate beginning in kindergarten on up) to a homemaking career. I was applying the values and expectations and strategies of accomplishing tasks and providing high-quality deliverables on time to my home and family life and it just didn’t work! To explain why this was so more clearly, I want to look at different ways we define success and find fulfillment and point out which ones apply to a money-making career versus a homemaking career. 

In school and in our money-making careers, measures of success are pretty easy to see. You get a good grade, you get a raise, you do things faster and more efficiently and with greater skill than the competition. To succeed, you need good working relationships with peers of your class, and while there are personality differences and great challenges and creative thinking needed, you are typically all conscious of a common goal and when you do something to further that goal, you are appreciated, respected, and compensated with either good grades or good money. Progress in your job is easy to measure: you get better, faster, more skillful, more popular, or more valuable in your field. Fulfillment comes from a job well done and knowing whether you’ve done a good job or not is pretty clear because we have been trained from childhood up to recognize success in the money-making system. It’s a good system and provides great benefit. It’s definitely needed. 

But in homemaking, such measures of success are not always applicable and can actually discourage or obscure true progress and value in what you do. There are no grades or raises, and there really isn’t any valuable competition with peers. About valuable competition: I don’t count “keeping up with the joneses” or striving for a social-media-worthy lifestyles as participating in valuable competition. Looking at other people’s situations and lifestyles can be inspiring, but I’ve noticed that measuring homemaking success by such comparison is often toxic. This is because comparing your homemaking with someone else’s, be it mommyvlogger89 or your sister-in-law,

(1) tends to create excessive focus on the material side of homemaking because that’s the part that’s really easy to see, judge and compare; 

(2) often misses the important emotional environment the homemaker creates, the interpersonal side that really makes a house a home; and

(3) fails to account for the very unique circumstances of your own life situation.

So yeah. Valuable competition in homemaking does not come from competing with peers. Probably the best form of valuable competition in homemaking comes from comparing your present efforts with past efforts and noting your personal growth trajectory. But progress in a homemaker’s role is not always easy to measure: does the ability to clean the whole kitchen in fifteen minutes flat mean you’re a good homemaker? Not necessarily. And while assessing personal progress, even if it is difficult, is a great exercise, it was perhaps only a part of the way we measured our success in a money-making career.

Which brings us to another big difference in how we measure our success: There is usually no immediate monetary compensation for our efforts. But, even though the homemaking career is not paid in money, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pay monetarily. Investopedia says that the services provided by a stay-at-home parent (i.e. homemaker) would be valued at a median annual salary of $178,201. (For more on the economic value of a career homemaker, try reading the book Radical Homemaking.) But this six-figure economic value does not come in the form of a paycheck, which can make it harder to recognize. 

Perhaps this lack of recognition is the crux of the challenge: often, homemaking efforts seem (or really are) unnoticed or unappreciated when done well, while failing to put forth these efforts causes complaint. Sometimes, as a homemaker, you don’t get the praise, but you do get the blame. And often this blame is coming from ourselves.

One solution to this is to try to achieve greater household success and recognition by getting the rest of the household to help with the work: the holy grail of homemaking. But in this effort, it may be difficult to come up with common goals with your family members, especially if the family members are opinionated and inexperienced children (or even your parter!). Sometimes, you efforts at getting some help and appreciation are not popular. At all. 

And let’s admit: it’s harder to find fulfillment in jobs that are truly never done, like dishes and laundry and keeping the peace. There’s actually a whole book on the history of American homemaking called Never Done. Ugh. (It’s by Susan Strasser if you’re interested.) 

BUT.

I am here to tell you that my homemaking career is now bringing me much more fulfillment than a money-making career ever could. For me, the keys to finding this fulfillment and to making the transition from a money-making career to a homemaking career are to 

(1) define what successes in homemaking looks like for you; and 

(2) transition from seeing never-done jobs as a nuisance to embracing them as cyclical  rituals of love, service, self care, and even worship. Housework as liturgy, if you will. 

Once I established what my roles and responsibilities are as a homemaker (and what they are not!), I could end the day with a clearer sense of what I had really accomplished and feel good about my efforts. And seeing my recurring jobs as opportunities for mindfulness and love instead of pesky checklists helped me find an enjoyable rhythm and beauty in doing what is, perhaps fortunately, never done.  

AND.

I also keep up my money-making career with small part-time opportunities. I haven’t completely turned my back on my money-making career, and you certainly don't have to. Knowing how to be and feel successful in both money-making and homemaking is possible and good. I am not saying that everyone can or should quit their job to be a homemaker, although you may find that's the best option. I am saying that, at some point, to find fulfillment in a homemaking role, we have to reframe our perceptions of success to fit the unique scenario a homemaking career presents--scenarios in which success criteria in the money-making realm do not always apply. 

SO.

How do I define my homemaking success and change my perspective on housework?

I’m still working on it. This course covers some of that. But a lot of this is personal, meaning up to you. So let’s keep working through the course. Hopefully it will help. But to get you started on finding your own answers, try this lesson. 

Make Simple Meal Plans and Grocery Lists

 I could go on forever about meal planning, cooking, shopping, etc. But the goal of this lesson is to help you streamline your kitchen experience by helping you plan simple meals that you can rely on for the time that you’re going to be working through this class. 

Getting better at homemaking takes some real effort, and we’ve got to carve that time out. Cooking can be a big time commitment if you’re a from-scratch purist like me, but it doesn’t have to be. Either way, planning is how you achieve good home cooking. 

There are LOTS of great ideas out there on how to meal plan. Here are the trends I see in what’s actually effective for our purposes:

• The plans focus on meals that the family likes and the the family chef is familiar with. New recipes are fun, but trying a new recipe too frequently is hard on the chef and the family.
• The plan is adjustable to meet seasonal changes, what’s on sale, and family dietary needs.
• The plan includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
• The plan focuses on meals that are not time consuming for the chef. If you’re into cooking and have skills, making a multi-course meal may not be that time consuming. If not, meals like spaghetti with bottled sauce and a bagged salad are the way to go. 
• The plan includes a regular break for the chef in the form of leftover night, takeout night, freezer meal night, or someone-else-is-cooking night. 
• The plan translates to a grocery list that is organized by sections in the grocery store. No more grocery-cart derby while you go back to isle five for the sixth time. You know what I’m talking about.

With these attributes of good meal planning in mind, here are some simple steps to getting started on your own meal plans:

Step 1: Make a big list of meals

Think of all the meals that you like to cook, that your family likes to eat (not always the same as what you like to cook), what you like to eat, what you want to get into eating more of, you get the idea. Just list them all. Breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Ask your family for ideas.

Step 2: Sort the list by prep time and food base

Looking at your list, pull out all the really easy meals and put them together. Do this also for the meals that take more work. Then, sort each of these lists by the base food that makes up the meal: for me, this is usually the carb or the protein. So I’ll have a list of easy bean dishes, easy chicken dishes, easy pasta dishes, easy rice dishes, etc. Do the same with the stuff that’s more involved. 

Notice what makes your more challenging meals more challenging. Can you simplify the meal to achieve a similar result? For example, I love chicken pot pie, but making a pie crust takes and chopping the vegetables and making a white sauce from scratch takes a lot of time (for me). So how can I simplify? I don’t like pre-made pie crusts, but if I did, that could be a great option. Could I make the pie filling and put it on a baked potato or rice or even pasta instead? How about using a bag of frozen vegetables instead of chopping everything myself? What about using cream of chicken soup from a can or box instead of making my own white sauce? These kinds of tweaks to more time-consuming recipes can make some of your favorite but difficult recipes more achievable. No, it won’t taste the same as the amazing completely from-scratch version, but it may still be quite delicious. 

Step 3: Make a place to write your plan on a regular basis

Some people have places in their planners that they write their meals. Some people put their plan on the refridgerator. Some people are completely digital and write it on their google calendars. It doesn’t matter. Just write down your plan in a place where you’ll see it before you go grocery shopping and before you start cooking anything. 

Mine typically looks like this table:

	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday
Breakfast	10 Grain	Rice cereal	Sourdough Pancakes	Leftover pancakes	Eggs and hashbrowns	10 grain	Eggs and toast
Lunch	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers	Leftovers
Dinner	Uncle Chris's soup	Pinto beans and rice	Clam chowder	Pasta with tomato and cheese	Oven-fried chicken and mashed potatoes (with giblet gravy?)	Tomato soup	Meatloaf and rice	Beef and Barley Soup
To Do
	Start broth--beef	Grind and soak soft white wheat	Thaw clams and clam juice	Thaw chicken	Start broth--chicken	refresh broth	Groceries and Meal planning	thaw barley
	Soak beans	Make giant salad	Make cauliflower/carrot pickles				refresh broth	Thaw beef
	Thaw beans	Prep start for bread and pancakes?	Refresh broth
	Soak rice	Grind flour	Freeze broth for beef and barley soup
		Mix bread	Make pancakes
		refresh broth	Bake bread

You’ll notice that my plan includes a to do list. If you’re cooking a lot from scratch, using stuff from the freezer, pre-soaking beans or grains, or are a nutcase like me and enjoy doing your own sourdough bread, sometimes you need to start preparing your meals well in advance--even a few days in advance. Having that “to do list” to remind you to pull out the chicken to thaw the day before you’re going to use it is really helpful. 

The only thing this plan does not demonstrate well is a break for the chef. One night should be a crock pot meal, or a leftovers night, or going out to eat, or something like that. I really feel that the chef or the family of chefs ought to have one night off on a regular basis. If you can afford to eat out regularly, try new foods and places where you can get ideas of what to cook when you are at home. Eating out is a great way to expand your food horizons. We all get stuck in that rut of things we always cook. 

If you’re trying to expand your list of cook-at-home meals, another great idea is to throw in one night where you try a new recipe on a regular basis. Just make sure you’ve got a calm evening or afternoon where you have the time you need to get into a new cooking project. New recipes, even for simple meals, always take more time the first time you try them. 

Step 4: Plan on a regular basis

For a long time, Thursday was my shopping day. I would do all my grocery shopping once a week. I highly recommend shopping as infrequently as possible, unless you really enjoy it. Some people shop much less frequently than once a week, but for my family, because we need so much fresh produce, once a week is about the longest we can go. 

Since I always shopped on Thursdays, I would plan meals and check out sales on Wednesdays. That’s why my meal plan goes from Thursday to Thursday. Do whatever works for you. 

When making the week’s meal plan, consider 

• the giant list of meals you generated. This list can help you stay out of the “food rut” we all get stuck in from time to time. 
• your schedule and events. If you’re keeping your calendar nearby while planning (and you should be!) you’ll avoid trying to pull of something ambitious and time-consuming (like home-made everything from scratch chicken pot pies) on Tuesday nights when you’re supposed to be running the cub scout pack meeting. You’ll also be more likely to remember it’s your spouse’s birthday on Wednesday and you want to cook something special that day. Plan meals with your bigger life plan in mind. 
• food you’ve already got on hand. Start the grocery shopping in your own house. Look through the freezer, fridge, pantry, and that place under the bed where you keep food storage. What needs to be used up? Work that stuff into your plan. If you’re planning well, you can consistently build and draw on bulk food storage (it saves lots of money to buy and use staples like rice and beans and wheat in bulk). With good planning, you can also make certain more expensive items stretch. That free-range, grass-fed, perfectly pampered organic whole chicken ($$$) can be roasted Sunday, used for sandwiches or in a curry on Monday, and turned into bone-broth for soup on Tuesday and Wednesday. That kind of cooking saves time and money, but it just doesn’t happen without a plan.
• what’s on sale right now. I have our grocery store’s sales bookmarked on my web browser for easy reference when I’m meal planning, but you may want to use those mailers or coupons or whatever. Planning around sales is a great way to save money and enjoy seasonal foods, since what’s in season is often what’s on sale. 
• changes in weather and mood. Some people, like my mom, don’t like having things planned out in so much detail, but still have a very workable meal plan. My mom just makes a list of the meals she wants to make that week and then looks at it before she starts cooking anything. She’ll decide a few hours before dinner what sounds good to her to make and eat that day, and then, because she bought the ingredients her plan needed in advance, she can cook up whatever she wants from her plan that night. 

Do what works for you. 

The point is, make a plan. It will help you know what to buy and what to cook. It will help prevent food waste and keep you from having fast food for dinner more often than you should. Your health and your budget will thank you.

Now, if you can afford it, there are lots of meal planning services and apps and things like that out there that can take care of a lot of this aspect of life for you for a little or a large price, depending on all the services you decide to buy. This option seems like a great idea to me if you’re interested in trying new recipes or further simplifying your kitchen experience so you can use that time elsewhere. But if, like me, you’ve got more time than funding, the method I’ve shared or any of those myriad other excellent meal planning methods out there will still help you streamline your cooking and your grocery shopping experience. 

Step 5: Shop for what your plan calls for

Once you’ve got a plan, you can go shopping! Make your life easier by organizing your shopping list by grocery store sections, like “produce” “dairy” “meat” “dry goods” “paper goods” etc. This may seem like it would take more time, but if you set up a sheet for yourself, either digitally or in print, you’ll end up saving a ton of time and legwork at the grocery store. 

Tip: If you’re in a particularly busy time of life, and if you’re planning on taking the rest of this course, I recommend focusing your meal plans on very simple meals, at least until you’ve simplified other areas of your life enough to get more time back for cooking. 

Homework: Try meal planning and an organized shopping list this week.