A production based Kitchen

Prior to the pandemic, all of our organizational issues were blamed on busy out of home work schedules and long busy hours.  During the shutdown we both transitioned to working from home and had very few work hours outside of the house.  This was the point it became very evident that the system of cooking, grocery shopping and storing food was not a problem of time, but a problem from the habits we had formed.  

With years of experience in production and developing processes I decided to help Mary with the problems she was discovering.  The good news was we both agreed that shopping, meal planning and storage could be much easier and we both realized that this was no reason to add chaos to our life.

With my personality I naturally break things down to chunks of information and then work on improving each chunk individually.  This started our year long trip of auditing each section of how our home kitchen and recipes worked.  With each mini problem we found we came up with a mini fix with really only one rule in mind. 

Rule: Will this make things easier

This was the entire thought behind everything.  We didn't mind if there was work upfront in order to make things much easier going forward.  

Problems became solutions

• Lack of diversity in our meals became a rotating recipe box
• Forgetting specific items at the store became a shared shopping list app
• Shopping last minute became the same day each week grocery shopping
• This went on and on with a mini fix to each mini problem

So over the year Mary brought to me problem after problem and I would look at it from a production/process standpoint.  I was trying to make it as organized as possible but I also wanted it to be flexible in case things changed in our day to day life.  This brought up the idea of organized-ish.  

What is Organized-ish

This became the idea that things could change but that change would not disrupt the process and bring chaos.  

The best example is a guest coming for dinner and pulling out a salad to add another side so we had enough food.  Things like this example come up sometimes daily. Prior to this plan we would have been scrambling to get something on the table or running to the grocery store last minute or telling the guest we were not available.  We just didn't have a system that could keep our life running in the direction we need it to with changes.  We took on the challenge to be organized enough to handle changes or mistakes without having to run to the grocery store or scratch things all together.  We did this because we knew that changes were going to happen out of our control and so we changed the part we did have control over. 

There is a fine line between structure and chaos.

Her plan has really changed everything from grocery shopping to meal planning to having guests stop over. Its been fun to be more productive with less work and much less chaos and stress.