Organization Hacks: The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Meal Planning

Want to save hours of your time, and dollars on your budget? Planning your meals ahead of time is a well known but massively under-appreciated hack.

How often do you just stare into the fridge?  You're hungry, but there's “nothing” to eat. Your pace around your apartment, roaming from the fridge, to the cupboard, to the pantry, over and over again.  Grumbling and sighing to yourself, unable to make a decision.  Finally, you pop a bag of popcorn and wander back to studying or watching a show on Netflix.

It's a couple of hours later now, and you realize you are starving all over again.  But now it's too late to cook, and your roommate is asleep.  You can’t just start clanking around in the kitchen.  So, what are you do?

Do you order in?  Do you drive to McDonald's?  This time you just suffer with a bowl of cereal.

We need to break the cycle of spending hundreds of dollars a month on fast food. It does nothing for your energy levels and it depletes your bank account. instead, we are going to make a plan and, we're even going to save time and money just by doing it.

The best way to go about this is to batch and plan our meals.  Depending on our schedule and obligations, there are 3 levels of investment we can commit to. 

Planning your meals for the week can be as simple or as complicated as your cooking skill.

If you enjoy cooking, and do it all the time, you probably have a lot of great recipe ideas on hand.  Plan out 5 to 7 meal ideas for the week and list all of the ingredients you're going to need. 

If your culinary skills are somewhat lacking. you can also go on the web and look up some easy recipe ideas. There are tons of different ways to search.  You can find five recipe ideas, 30-minute recipe ideas. whatever suits your time and budget restraints.

If you are coupling this meal planning with budgeting, maybe try and pick several recipes that have similar ingredients, to cut down on costs. This is a fun activity, especially if you are adventurous or like trying new things.

Not only have you now committed to a menu for the week, but you also have your grocery list.  Doing one grocery shop weekly will save you time from making multiple trips to the store throughout the week.  It will also save you money from the impulse purchases that you would rack up on these extra trips.  A chocolate bar here and a bottle of Pop there really add up over time, especially when you're trying to save.

From here, you have a couple of options, you can go on to do the grocery shopping, return and put your supplies away or, you can prepare your ingredients.  Upon arriving home and unloading your groceries, decide if you want to advance on to this second stage of planning.

Preparing everything ahead of time will save you time daily by being able to just take a prepared meal and pop it into the oven to cook. 

Batching the prep time also might give you a little bit more flexibility in terms of what you want to eat on which night. Having a bunch of prepped meals can also save time overall on cleaning and dishes since you won't have quite as many each night.   Just be sure to safely store the ingredients to avoid spoilage and cross-contamination.

If you have the available time, you can also cook and freeze portions for use throughout the week.  This allows even more flexibility because then you can just pop a serving in the microwave.   Batch cook intricate meals like a lasagna or shepherd's pie that require you to make larger portions and then just freeze them.   

Having one batch cooking night weekly, and stocking up, will save even more time and dishes day today.  The only limitation to this process is having enough freezer space.

This is also a great option if you just need a few emergency meals on hand for days that you are super pressed for time.  Having some meals frozen in the freezer can take the weight off.