I Only Do Meal Planning Once A Month
By: Lauren Harkawik
Tags: Cooking, Self, Meal Planning, Home, Food

Over the past few months, I’ve transformed my approach to meal planning. The result has been a big uptick in the amount of meals my family makes and eats at home. Overall, we’re more satisfied with the variety in our diet, and we have been eating more healthfully.

What made the difference is an approach to work called “batch working.”

What’s batch working?

Sometimes I call it “block scheduling.” Basically, rather than doing smaller tasks toward one pursuit each day (or frequently), you set aside a large chunk of time and tackle a number of related tasks all at once. I first read about it as a technique to organize one’s various freelance pursuits, and I decided to give it a try.

So, for example, as a storyteller, I have several different ways I accomplish what I do. I write essays, articles, and fiction, and I also work as a reporter for my local newspaper. Before I discovered batch working, I would do a little bit of work for each of those categories every day.

With batch working, each day of the week is assigned to one of those disciplines, and I only focus on that discipline that day. For example, my newspaper goes to print on Thursdays, so I typically spend all day Wednesday focusing on newspaper writing. No essays, no fiction, no non-newspaper articles. This allows me to really focus on that work in an in-depth way, and it also frees me up on my other days to focus on my other pursuits.

When I started doing batch working for my writing work, I realized that it could be beneficial in other areas of my life, too. Though it’s been great for my writing, the place where I’ve seen the biggest benefit is in meal planning.

Here’s what I do:

Rather than spend time every Sunday to plan out meals for the week, I set aside a solid hour once a month to sit with my cookbooks and make one, giant master list of meals that I will make over the course of the month. I add at least 30 meals to the list.

I have 5–6 cookbooks I like. I take them all off of the shelf and leaf through them. If something stands out to me, I put it on the list, along with the cookbook name and page number. I make separate lists for main dishes and side dishes.

Each week, I look at my master list and pick 5–7 meals, depending on how many nights we plan to be home for dinner that week. Then I buy groceries for those meals.

I cross off the meals I’ve selected from the master list. As the month goes on, I have fewer choices, but that’s okay.

Here’s one of my lists:

The codes next to each dish are my own codes for the cookbooks they’re from. The letter tells me which book to go to; the number tells me which page. Photo credit: me.

What’s been positive:

I find that by having a master list to go to, I’m much less intimidated by weekly meal planning, which means I actually do it instead of putting it off. For me, I find that preparedness is the key to actually eating healthfully and affordably. If I have no plan, dinnertime rolls around and so does a call to the pizza place. And if meal planning feels like it’s going to be time consuming, I put it off. It’s a vicious cycle.

I’m using my cookbooks! For years I’ve had cookbooks on the shelf but without a proper meal planning plan in place, I’d go to the same staples every week. Grilled chicken with potatoes and kale; spaghetti; etc. By setting aside quality time for me and my cookbooks, I’m actually mining them for all they have to offer, which has been awesome.

By dedicating an hour of quality work time, I spend much less time on a weekly basis doing meal planning. Generating ingredient lists for the meals I choose each week takes under 10 minutes, because I note the recipe pages on my master list. All I have to do is flip to them and grab the ingredients lists.

Bottom line:

Switching over to a batch work approach for meal planning has totally changed how I go about planning meals and it’s been really positive for my family. I recommend at least giving it a try to see if it might work for you.