On a typical Monday morning, after having silenced the annoying alarm you make your way down to the kitchen. Rubbing your eyes you open the fridge, putting your half-awake brain to work. Panic sets in as you realize you have just 1 hour before the kids are up and by then breakfast, lunch, and snacks need to be ready for their school and your office. Not the most ideal of situations, right?
Let us rewind the clock to the previous night. You take a few minutes to take stock of the items in your fridge and as you wind down for the night you make a mental note of the items you are going to prepare in the morning. Better? Yes, the stress of figuring out 2 meals and a snack in the precious time you have in the mornings is gone. But, when planning for the next day at the end of a tiring day are we confident that we are doing justice to the nutritional needs of the family? How can we be sure the fridge has everything we need and there are no constraints to making a wholesome meal?
Going a few steps further, let us rewind the clock to Sunday morning. As you sip your morning coffee, you pull out a piece of paper and jot down on the first row the days of the week. The first column has the items breakfast, snack, lunch, snack 2, and dinner. You take a few minutes to populate the table. You use this table to do grocery shopping and stock up your fridge. Is this convenient?
Now, let’s take this to the next level. Does the table you created have some standard content each week? Days of the week? Names of the meals? How about creating a template to use every Sunday morning? Psst… You can reuse the plans after a few weeks 🙂 Now all that is left is printing a few templates out and putting them in the corner kitchen drawer. Once your table is populated, the fridge magnet can hold your plan in place for you to view in the morning. Thus creating a system for you to drive your mornings while fueling the nutritional needs of the family. Making sure that you never have to scramble for ingredients to make your family’s favorite meal.
Let us take a moment to think about what goes into making the plan work for your family. 1. Your pre-teen son’s growing needs? 2. Your toddler daughter’s nutritional needs, 3. Your body’s need for veggies and fruits in your sedentary lifestyle? Can we be sure these things are considered in the 1 minute we have to plan a meal on Monday morning or even Sunday night? This is the bigger purpose that the plan helps to serve, a small byproduct of this is making your life that much easier by taking the stress factor out.
This concept makes even more sense in your fast-paced industry. Imagine if your employees are driven by their weekly planners. They do not need to wait for your instructions every day. As an organization, the weekly planners convert to monthly planners and the monthly planners to annual planners. The annual planners are driven by the organization’s business objectives much like the nutritional needs of a family.
If this makes sense, do not forget to contact Leanacle to facilitate empowering your employees to do their jobs. We make visual management tools that drive your organization – starting from the grassroots level up until the middle management levels.