Simple, boring, doable
St. Patrick’s out here healing the sick, and I’m delighted to just be able to fix myself a sandwich. (National Library of Ireland)
One of my biggest, stupidest problems is that I really struggle to make meals for myself.
For a long time, I thought it was laziness. But I am a hard worker in many areas of my life. If anything, it seemed to have more to do with weak planning and a lack of prioritization.
While it’s been fun having a wide array of culinary choices at my disposal in the fabulous Atlanta restaurant scene over the past few months (plus, living alone so that I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted), I finally got to the point that I didn’t want to eat out anymore. I didn’t want to have to scavenge at mealtimes. I wanted to go back to packing my lunch to take to work and eating dinners at home. I was ready for a different flavor of hassle.
So I went to the grocery store and stocked up. I got sandwich and salad ingredients. So far, so good.
The next morning, when I balked at the idea of having to go to the trouble to make lunch, I decided to time myself. It took seven minutes to make lunch — which is probably less time than it generally takes me to decide what to have for lunch on a typical day. Aha!
And the next day, I realized that I could make the exact same lunch again. This time, it took less than six minutes.
Having simplified both my meal plan and routine to a Silicon Valley CEO level of elegance, I reflected on how hard it has been to consistently prepare my own meals. This seemed so easy now. What would cause me to fall off the wagon and lapse into restaurant food again?
I realized that if the hard part wasn’t going to be making the food, it was going to be running out of food. What I had to do was keep going to the grocery store.
Pardon me if this seems really obvious to the grown-ups out there, but I had never really looked at this aspect of my life this way, from a “streamlining operations” standpoint the way I might with my business. The simple fact was that I often failed to prioritize such basics as food acquisition, leaving me with all kinds of downstream problems. But to prevent all of those, all I needed to do was keep going to the grocery store.
If I keep going to the grocery store, I will not run out of food. If I don’t run out of food, I will be able to keep making my six-minute sandwiches and salads. Then, I will be able to eat when I’m hungry without spending a lot of extra time and money.
Simple, boring, doable. There’s no magic to it. I’ve solved tricky problems like this before: Publish my writing frequently by scheduling frequent time to write. Ensure that I respond to every phone call by putting “check voicemail” on my to-do list as a recurring task. Stop overdrawing my bank account by keeping a budget and checking my bank balance regularly. Solutions abound, and the best ones are embarrassingly straightforward.
My creative brain likes to tackle the novel and interesting; I’m always tempted to skip over the routine and unremarkable. But that has caused enough problems in the past that I’m deriving a lot of satisfaction from mending my ways. Going to the grocery store is just one basic chore that stimulates a virtuous cycle to improve my life. What is one of yours?
