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Because there are so many facets of our mommy life I want to break them down into smaller chunks.  

Today’s topic will benefit you whether you have a biz already or not because we are going to talk about my biggest time sucker…

Food, grocery shopping, and meal planning.  

And since it’s still January most of us are trying really hard to eat healthier and choose healthier options.

I don’t know about you but I am the one in charge of getting the family feed and everything that goes with it especially because my hubby travels for work almost every week.  

I have this love-hate relationship with this role of mine because I love food and I love grocery shopping but having the time to plan, shop, prep, and cook can make me want to throw up my hands in defeat, order take out and have a glass of wine instead.

But that doesn’t work for me either.  I haven’t told you this but I have an autoimmune thyroid disease and I have to eat mainly Paleo in order to keep my symptoms at bay. Paleo take out is very limited in Plano, TX so I have to cook most of my food.  

The only upside to this is that my kids eat lots of veggies and eat mainly home-cooked meals.  So yay for that….But that means that on top of me running a biz, getting kids to school, taking care of everything that the house needs (dishwasher not working, kids put something in the toilet that I can’t get out or the other hundred things that homeownership requires), carting the kiddos to any extracurricular activities, and the mountains of laundry that a family of 5 makes all fall on me.

Now I’m not complaining about all of these roles that I have. I’m super grateful for the life that I have and I gladly take these on. But let’s get real…it’s a lot of work and it’s exhausting.  

So after years of feeling defeated and spending way too much time thinking about food. I have set up a pretty good system now and I want to share with you. So hopefully you take away some great ideas or if you have an awesome system that works please share it with me. I’m always tweaking and adjusting.

The first thing that has saved me, like really saved me is meal plans.

I know, you’re probably cringing right now but hear me out.  I give up about 90 minutes (when you 1st start it will take probably take a little longer until you get super efficient at prepping) on Sunday afternoon and have food prepped and ready to go for the whole week.  Now if I have a busy Sunday then I move my prep day to Monday.  We work from home so you get to choose whatever day works best for you plus sometimes it’s just easier when the kids aren’t at home.

You can choose to spend time figuring out and planning your own meal plan and that might work for you but that didn’t work for me.  I found myself making lists of easy go tos and spending hours going down the Pinterest rabbit hole and then not even making any of those meals because they ended up being too complicated or time-consuming or I was missing one key ingredient.  

So I opted for a meal planning service.  They do all of the picking and choosing for me for about $8 a month so totally worth it. Plus the one I use is made for gluten-free and Paleo peeps like me. It’s called Prep Dish and totally love the recipes.  It’s pretty cool because it gives you step by step instruction for your prep day and then instructions for the day that you make that meal.  

Meal Delivery Service

For a while, I was just using a Sun Basket meal delivery service that sent me 2-3 recipes a week with all of the ingredients and instructions to make those meals.  This was great but some of the recipes were a little more challenging to pull off for a weeknight meal.  I needed to pay close attention to the recipe steps and we all know with kids running around that’s kinda hard to do. Plus with my husband traveling so often I would end up wasting some of the food and I hate wasting food.

I really love the food Sun Basket sends so now I check out the meals at the beginning of each month and incorporate them into my meal plans too.  

So meal planning and prepping, super important, sucks on prep day but totally worth it.

So let’s tackle the next big time suck.  Grocery shopping.

If you have a service like my favorite InstaCart and Amazon Prime. Please start using them. If you are running a business or want to run a biz and you live in a place that these amazing tools are available to you then I don’t want to hear your excuses like but I love grocery shopping or I they wouldn’t take the time to choose stuff like I do.  

Dude, the hours it saves you are well worth it. You could be using that time to move forward and take action in your biz and life.  

I use InstaCart at least twice a week to do almost all of my shopping from my favorite stores.  I can even have wine delivered to me so of course, they’re my favorite.  Plus not walking down the isles at Costco has saved me so much money.  ?

Each week I import my shopping list from Prep Dish to InstaCart so that saves me even more time.  Plus it keeps a list of all of the items I regularly purchase so it’s easy to add them to my cart and I don’t usually forget anything. 

Now Amazon Prime, I have a feeling most of you use this already but if you don’t I have no words.  I just don’t know how you’ve survived without this.  

I use Amazon for all of those random things I need throughout the week but I also use Amazon Subscribe & Save for all of that stuff that I need on a regular basis.  Toilet paper, trash bags, dishwasher detergent, vitamins, toothbrush heads and even air filters.  I set up a delivery schedule and these items magically show up on my doorstep.  I get the essentials but I also set up things like the air filters & toothbrush heads as a reminder to actually change them out. 🙂  

The fewer things I have to actually keep in my brain the better and the more I can open up white space to create.

So those are my mommy tips for today.  I hope these ideas can get you thinking about all of the stuff you can automate in your home.  

In the next episode, we are going to discuss part 2 of the Automating your home life series which is the next biggest time suck…housekeeping.

If you have any questions that you would like me to answer on the podcast please email them to questions@mommyhomeoffice.com.

As always, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

Mentions:

Prep Dish

Sun Basket

InstaCart

Amazon Prime and Amazon Subscribe & Save

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