Use Google Calendar to Plan More Interesting Weekly Menus

A lot has been said about how busy moms can ease their kitchen planning by using a weekly menu. The concept is simple; cooking a type of meal based on which day of the week it is - Monday is chicken, Tuesday is fish, Wednesday is pasta, Thursday is red meat and eat out on Friday to give Mom a break. This helps the busy household manager especially when the kids ask, "What's for dinner tonight, Mom?"

But what if at the end of a very busy day at work, you just start to think about cooking 'chicken' for dinner? Then, every Monday becomes grilled chicken or every Tuesday sees steamed fish on the plate and soon, your efforts to mix up the meal plans of the week seem to go down the drain?

I'm easily bored with the food I eat and I love to try new recipes I chance across whether browsing a book at the store or something I saw on Nigella Lawson. So, I married a few techniques to get around this problem - I use a David Allen GTD system with Google Calendars for a weekly menu and Remember The Milk for my groceries. You don't have to use all the tools I do, you may have a great system for your groceries that you could just add to.

Step One: The Infrastructure
First up, set up a Google Calendar account if you don't have one already.If you have one already, great! Then you just set up a Menu calendar at Settings: Calendar: Create New Calendar. I'm a visual person so I color code all my different calendars to keep track of who does what and when.

Step Two: Enter the meal when you think of it
I then use the Calendar with the concept of the Weekly Menu so that I enter into the Menu Calendar any great ideas for food I come across. If I watch Nigella Lawson whipping up a Pot Pie in no time and think I can do the same, I enter 'Chicken Pot Pie' on the next Monday possible since I cook Chicken on Monday. If my husband has a craving for meatball pasta, I slot it into the next Wednesday available that I haven't planned for since I cook pasta on Wednesday. If you see something that takes your fancy and you plan it into your weekly menu, you will get to cook it! That's a simple GTD concept. Stay consistent and enter the food you'd like to cook into the right day of the week as you go along. You'll have weeks of interesting food you want to cook and eat and you'll know exactly what to buy when you go grocery shopping.

Step Three: Go Shopping with your Calendar and Grocery List
Come Saturday, when I start planning my grocery list, I look at my Menu calendar and its all planned out for me what I'll cook for the rest of the week. I look at books, search online for recipes, the newspapers for coupons and start planning what I'll need to buy in order to cook the food I've planned out for the week. I only put items on my groceries that I don't already have in my pantry, that way I won't buy more than I actually need.

Step Four: Look forward to a great meal from the start of the day
And when Monday comes around, and the first thing I do at work is check my agenda for the rest of the day, my calendar shows me that I'll know what I'm going to cook, e.g. Monday's agenda shows Meet Client for Big Meeting, Lunch with Lawyer and Cook Chicken Pot Pie for dinner. That's a great motivation for me to get through the day!