Latest / JOY LOVING HOME - SAHM, Productivity, Home Organization, Declutter, ADHD Mom, ADHD SAHM, ADHD Brain / 269: Retroactive Meal Planning: The Post-It Hack for Busy Families

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269: Retroactive Meal Planning: The Post-It Hack for Busy Families · JOY LOVING HOME - SAHM, Productivity, Home Organization, Declutter, ADHD Mom, ADHD SAHM, ADHD Brain

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  Summer feels like a great time to pull out all of the shortcuts and hacks and
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  easy living kind of tips, but this particular hack could honestly work anytime.
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  I am going to share it very quickly, and for those of us who absolutely are
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  allergic to meal planning, my hand is up.
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  It is something that I want you to at least give a try. I promise you,
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  if this is something I can do, it may be the something that you can actually pull off.
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  A wise person once said, everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its
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  ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid.
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  Well, fish, quit trying to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys.
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  It's time to jump in the water and learn how to swim with the current of your life.
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  I'm Joy, a professional organizer, mom of four, and fellow Fishbrain.
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  If you're looking for a place to get understanding, encouragement,
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  and ideas for your home that actually fit how your brain thinks,
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  then I'm glad you're here.
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  Let's ditch the type A advice and embrace what makes our brains and our homes unique.
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  Together, we could have a joy-loving home.
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  So I for whatever reason have a massive aversion,
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  to meal planning I don't know where it originates I don't know what it's about,
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  I don't mind cooking I don't even really mind cleaning,
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  I love having dinner with my family it is something we have always prioritized
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  even through the crazy years of practices and,
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  has been working an hour away in the Atlanta commute like all the things we
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  would still prioritize meals. So I value it.
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  That's never been the issue. The issue seems to be.
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  Feel like the meal planning and then needing to make sure I had all the ingredients
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  on hand and had that sort of,
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  thought through ahead of time knowledge of what was going to take place for a week at a time.
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  I would get frustrated because inevitably I would end up forgetting,
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  one ingredient and still having to dash out to the store or I would get all
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  the things painstakingly from the planning to the shopping list to the shopping
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  at the store to getting it home to getting it all put it away and then,
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  forget what the actual plan was or we would start faithfully along it and then
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  there would be a shift and I love staying flexible when an opportunity arises
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  because I'm all about living in the moment
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  and so I would let things go to waste because a meal that had been planned for
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  a certain night would just go by the wayside.
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  So then for a very long time, I adopted what I used to call European shopping.
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  And I literally would think of what we were going to have for dinner at, I don't know, 5 p.m.
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  And because my husband worked so far away from the house, I could get to the
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  grocery store, buy all the ingredients, get home, fix a meal,
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  and get it on the table before he walked in and we all sat down.
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  Obviously, at this version of my life, I had independent children who could,
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  watch each other long enough for me to go to the grocery store and back and, you know, meal prep.
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  Ah, these days needed to come to an end because truly not the best use of time,
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  although I'm not far from that now, I have to confess.
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  But I still think the aggravation has always been around the coming up with
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  the idea and having somebody else tell me, these are the ingredients you're
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  going to need, do you have them on hand?
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  I would love for someone, I'm going to put this out into.
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  The existence, to create a page a day calendar that has on Sundays a list of
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  every food item you're going to need that week and then each day it would just be the meal.
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  The meal with like, I don't know, the recipes on it. I don't know how you create
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  this in a page a day calendar, but in my head this would be brilliant because
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  on Sunday I could see all the ingredients. I could get the things I didn't have.
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  And then each day, I wouldn't even have to worry about what we were having.
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  Just each morning when I pulled the little page off, I would see that day's
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  meal and I'd be like, great, now I know what we're having.
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  I would love the mindlessness of this. But anyway, none of that has ever happened for me.
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  So my newest version that I have been trying for quite a little while now,
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  and it's not perfect, but it's a suggestion that I'm throwing out all of the
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  easy summer hacks this summer.
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  And it might be something you would enjoy.
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  The supplies that you need for this particular, what I am terming retroactive
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  meal planning is ideally, again, you can do this any way you want.
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  There are no real rules. But in the ideal setting, I had one of those like paper
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  desk calendars that, I don't know, who knows how many years old it is.
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  It's blank. It doesn't have year or month. You write in that.
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  So anyway, I pin that into my, I've got like a blank wall in the pantry, pinned it up there.
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  Then you take post-it notes that are about the size of the square.
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  And each night after you eat, there's no forethought.
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  After you eat, you write down what you had and you stick it on that day of the week.
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  I don't even put that. I don't, I don't need the days of the week.
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  I know a calendar is laid out Sunday to Saturday.
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  It doesn't matter. It's week one, week two, week three, week four,
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  whatever. You don't need actual dates on this calendar. You understand how calendars
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  work so that you can reuse this over and over again.
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  But you just write in what you had. It doesn't matter if you picked up from,
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  you know, Chipotle that day. It doesn't matter if you had pancakes.
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  It doesn't matter that you ate at a friend's house.
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  It doesn't matter. You just write down the meal you had. I'm only speaking dinner
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  right now, but technically you could do this for all the meals.
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  And then at the end of that month, you actually have a month-long meal plan.
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  It's not ideal. It's not designed with the grocery store in mind.
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  But honestly, that was never, that's like another issue.
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  Coming up with the idea is the focus that we're doing here.
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  And the cool thing, and you could just pencil it in on this calendar. That would be fine.
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  And you could choose to erase. I just like the post-it note idea simply because,
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  then you can look back on that month and go, huh,
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  I did not realize that we had breakfast for dinner nine times this month.
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  I don't mind having breakfast for dinner. I like breakfast for dinner, but nine times?
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  Maybe I'll pull a couple of these post-it notes out and we'll just kind of sort
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  of repeat this and see what we feel like the next time one of those squares is blank.
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  Or you can look at it and go, wow, we eat out every Wednesday.
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  I don't plan that. It just seems to be the day I'm exhausted or we have the
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  most going on. And I always feel guilty when we do it.
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  And guess what? I'm just going to declare Wednesdays, pick up night.
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  And ahead of time, we all know that's the plan. And I can quit feeling guilty.
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  That just solved for that.
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  Or you can go, man, we have a lot of...
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  Chicken, or we have a lot of beef, or we have a lot of fish,
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  or we have a lot of, we don't eat as many veggies as I'd like, whatever.
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  You get this snapshot without ever having to put pre-planning into it.
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  It's retroactive planning.
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  You can look at it and go, everybody's favorite meal, and I did not realize
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  everybody was going to love it, was when we had chicken salad. Who knew?
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  But nobody ate the hamburgers that one night. I don't know. I'm making all of this up.
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  But you get the point. You're going to have this month-long field of data that you can just go, huh.
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  And it took you no effort other than to remember each evening for somebody to
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  write down on a post-it note what you had and stick it on that square.
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  And if you live with very capable monkey brain children, Brin,
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  this is a task I would hand off to them because there is a kid whose brain will
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  love unless you live with all fish.
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  But if you have any monkeys in your family, give them the task of remembering
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  to write down what you had for dinner on the post-it and put it in the right square.
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  They will love that task or they will love nagging you to remind you to do it,
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  whichever, both work for accountability.
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  But the thought here being just spend a month collecting data.
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  You're not meal planning anyway.
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  And then observe, then you can keep tweaking this reusable four weeks worth of meal plan.
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  And if you want to next level it, once it's already created,
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  and you've tweaked a little bit, and you guys kind of feel happy about how things
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  are rolling, and I'm not at this level yet. So you tell me if this works,
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  but this is in my head the next step.
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  The next level to this would be to grab a, like a larger post-it.
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  And as you get through that week, start writing down the ingredients to these
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  things and keep it posted at the end of that week.
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  Because then you can take a snapshot of that on your phone and go,
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  these are going to be the ingredients I'm going to need going into next week.
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  And basically you're creating that dream page a day calendar of mine.
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  And then now we just need to get you to publish it. But anyway,
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  this is tailored to your family.
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  There are times when I've wanted to like purchase other people's meal plans
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  or set myself up with one of those meal box options, which I'm not saying are
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  the wrong thing because how wonderful to have all of it just show up and it's already purchased and,
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  portioned and you're just cooking. That would be lovely. but.
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  This one's tailored more to your family. You got the kids who don't eat onions.
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  You got the kids who won't eat noodles. I don't know. You've got the gluten-free kid.
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  Whatever the case may be, you are tailoring your own meal plan subscription
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  box just inside of your pantry on a paper calendar with some post-it notes.
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  So sounds like something fun? Give it a go. I'd love to hear your thoughts about
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  it. Or if you have additional wonderful hacks that I could share with the podcast
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  audience, I would love to hear them.
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  I am sort of soft testing a new website that I launched yesterday.
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  And in it, there is a place where you can message me about your thoughts on the podcast.
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  I would love to have you in a two-way conversation. I would love to share the
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  wealth of this audience with each other because you guys are amazing.
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  Or if you're in any of my groups, feel free to comment on this week's podcast
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  about how you all handle that very stressful ADHD unfriendly thought of meal planning.
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  So I would love to hear from you. I'll put all the links in the show notes,
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  but just as a quick recap, you can always email me joy at joylovinghome.com.
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  The free podcast group that where you can make comments, you get to by going
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  to bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity.
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  And until next time, continue to choose joy.