We love cooking (and eating!) so what was the problem? The problem was the deciding what to eat part, and the fact that this decision process was occurring every day, often after long and stressful days at the office.  Worse, this was often constrained by what was in the refrigerator causing us to repeat the decision process yet again or requiring an unplanned trip to the grocery store. Although we solved this problem before I read The 4-Hour Workweek, in the spirit of the book, I will say that this is a classic example of failing to batch. The inescapable time and effort of deciding what to eat was being repeated seven or more times a week. What we needed to do was get some economy of scale from this decision exercise by doing it only once a week.

Here is what we do: every Saturday morning we sit down and devise the following week’s menu.  Since it is the weekend, there is less time pressure and we often pull out some cookbooks or have fun recalling a good meal. By the end of it, we have come up with a menu for the week, everyday from Sunday to the next Saturday like the one below:

I cannot tell you how much stress this approach has reduced! Since the menu is on autopilot for the week, we also don’t suffer the psychological effort of task switching and can simply cook our meal while our minds may still be on our work or our kids (hopefully the latter!).

Perhaps a bigger benefit has been on our grocery bills. After we devise the menu for the week, we go through it and determine which ingredients are already in the refrigerator or pantry, and we put anything missing onto our weekly grocery list. As a result we only buy what we need (previously, we would over-buy not knowing exactly what we might be eating), and we batch our trips to the grocery store to basically one trip per week! When you think about it, that’s even good for the environment - who needs to buy some carbon credits from me?

Feel free to download my Weekly Menu Template (MS Excel file) now!

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