
Sandra Bullock
Once upon a time, my husband, Tom, and I both worked for a school district as non-certified staff. Both of us were paid monthly, and could partake of school lunch for free. Before you curl your lip and say, "Oh, gross!", let me tell you Irma Faye and Norma Lee made EVERYTHING from scratch, daily. It wasn't just a perk, it was a treat!
Not that Tom is hard to get along with or anything, but eating school spaghetti on Tuesday followed home spaghetti on Saturday wasn't his idea of culinary delights no matter how much he liked spaghetti. Alright. Since of course we had each month's school menu, I began making our home menus accordingly. I was just learning the wonders of technology, so creating a chart for our home menu was way cool. (I may have just a touch of nerdiness with that OCD.)
Making monthly menus and being paid monthly made it only reasonable to start grocery shopping on a monthly basis. To be truthful, there was lots of motivation to streamline besides being a control freak. While Tom and I were school employees, we were also going to college and trying to be super parents to two elementary kids. Developing and implementing a system that worked for us was a small price to pay for the time, money and energy we saved and could devote ourselves to much more important things, like our kids.
Tom and I figured out quickly one master list rewritten monthly, or even photocopied, could be improved. If that's where you are, great! You're headed in the right direction. Being an expert at charts by this time, I made and saved a master list for us to print and highlight each. Now we're cooking! (Sorry, that was just too good to pass up.) Once again, if this is where your tech skills are, keep up the good work!
The OCD nerd in me was thrilled to learn Excel spreadsheet. (I still have lots to learn, but it's working for me for what I usually want to do.) Super! I could organize items any way I wanted to. But wait, there's more: I can separate items by store into separate sheets in the same document, and still organize them. (Maybe we'll chat another time about why we go to 3 different stores to grocery shop, and still think it's efficient.)
Here's my newest discovery: I've copied my grocery lists into Google Drive. Tom isn't crazy about walking around the grocery store with our tablet, but I'm hoping he's up to shopping from his phone (I do most of the Walmart and he does the Aldi shopping.)
For me, putting extra into developing a grocery shopping list system is all about priorities: what's important? A little proactive work goes a long way towards helping me keep my priorities in focus.
40 But everything should be done in a way that is right and orderly.