A personal planner can not only help you make your appointments, but it can help you in the kitchen, tracking your meal plans, kitchen to-do’s, and helping you “make time” for meal prep.
Did you know that things that work well in business can often do double duty in life? And specifically in the kitchen? It’s true.
I’ve been known to use office supplies in the kitchen in the past. Binder clips are a must have for keeping recipes together or securing that package of something that needs being shut.
Even more so can the routines and management styles of “the real world” be adapted to help you eat better and save money and time in the kitchen!
Sooooo many people write to tell me that their biggest struggles in the kitchen are finding the time to meal plan and prep food. You know it will save you money and taste so much better than the alternatives, but life gets in the way.
Enter the Print & Go Planner
The Print & Go Planner
The Print & Go Planner is pretty simple. With its streamlined black and white design, it’s been developed to bring order to a harried life — to get you (and me) from point A to point Z without a lot of crazy.
This printable file is designed around a simple system: dream big dreams, break them down into yearly priorities, and then slowly chip away at them over the months and weeks. At the same time, keep the home fires burning with a meal plan and a weekly time budget.
When you open the planner, you’ll find
the What I want page
This is the space to dream big and identify the characteristics you want to describe your life.
Eating well, managing your finances, managing your kitchen? These things apply!
Next, you’ll find
Priorities for the Year
On the Priorities for the Year page, you’ll identify which things from your overall vision to focus on during the year.
Maybe you want to lower your cholesterol or reduce your debt. What you do in the kitchen applies here, too!
Moving through the planner, you’ll find
Goals or Systems to Develop
On the page marked “Goals or Systems to Develop” you’ll have space to articulate what goals and systems you can develop to make your life more like the one you dream about.
Those systems might include:
- Creating a weekly meal plan template.
- Developing a weekly meal prep habit.
- Establishing a way to deal with leftovers so that you waste less food.
- Growing as a home cook by cooking through all those cookbooks you’ve been collecting.
These intro pages can be developed as the year — and your dreams — grow.
Each month, you’ll have several pages to help you walk these out.
The Month’s Priorities at a Glance
Each month, you can chip away at those yearly goals by laying out specific steps to take during the coming weeks.
If improving your diet for health reasons is on the list, then what specific things can you do this month to help you further the cause? Research suggests that writing these things down will make you more likely to do them.
Priorities you might articulate for the month include:
- track water drank every day – get in 8 glasses
- shop the kitchen first – save money on groceries
- pack lunch every day to save on take-out
- start brewing tea and coffee instead of drinking soda
Monthly Calendar Pages
Each month’s calendar page will help you see the time you have to work with and to plan accordingly.
If you don’t plan to make things happen, they likely won’t.
Weekly To-Do’s and Meal Plan
The weekly to-do page allows you to grab tasks from your monthly list to place on the weekly list. Then each day pull a few from the weekly list to work on.
You’ll also have your week’s meal plan right there.
You can see at a glance what to do over the course of the week and be able to cherry pick what to do each day.
Pro tip: include your kitchen tasks on your weekly and daily to-do lists. This is how you “make time”. You identify what needs doing and admit there are no kitchen fairies. You have to do the work.
In fact, if you want, you can make the planner act as a kitchen manager:
Use your meal plan to direct your To Do This Week section with all the meal prep tasks you might need to accomplish in order to stick to the meal plan.
Then each day, grab the ones that need doing to put on today’s to-do list. In this way, you can more easily manage your kitchen time and get those meals prepped.
You can even stack and color-code your post-it notes for work, school, kids, and kitchen — and yet it’s all in one place!
Weekly Time Budget
Each week’s time budget provides space to plan out the week and where you’ll put feet to those big dreams and priorities.
The Print & Go Planner is my go-to resource for managing my time and tracking my goals. This is what I use every day to track my days and help me build a better life. Here’s how I use mine.
There’s even a Print & Go Student Planner (currently half off since the fall semester has been spent)!
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