If I had tried to figure out “what’s for dinner?” at 6 pm while feeding a couple hundred sailors, it would’ve been pure chaos. Instead — I ran a system. Again and again, that’s simple enough to repeat without thinking.

Planning 300,000+ meals at sea for months, with no grocery store for thousands of miles, taught me three habits I still use at home. They ensure the dinner decision is made before 6 pm ever arrives.

The contrarian point almost everyone skips: plan your week first, not your meals.

Sit down with anyone in your household (or do it solo) and sync up the week ahead. Think, anything on your calendars that conflict with meal times.

My example:

These calendar conflicts need to come before any recipe comes to mind.

After this quick review, in my notepad I’ll write out the days in one column, and conflicts in the other. It should look like this:

Don't get granular; you'll overcomplicate it. Keep it simple.

Match the meal to the energy of the day. A high-tempo morning = grab-and-go (overnight oats, breakfast sandwich made the night before). Monday through Friday is not for creativity in the kitchen. Save the TikTok recipe for the weekend.

And keep in mind, planned takeout counts as a planned meal. Planned takeout beats unplanned greasy delivery any day. You can schedule a healthier option in advanced. Make the call at 6 pm after a long day, and you’ll almost always order an unhealthy meal and over-order.

The only rule is you decide in advance.

Then build your grocery list by how you shop, not recipe order — protein, produce, pantry, mapped to how you actually walk the store. The typical approach is to write out ALL your ingredients after reading each recipe. That leads to chaos at the store. Zigzagging between aisles, wasting time.

My list looks like this:

My first mass order was ~$150,000 for a six-month deployment. Super stressful at first, until I learned the system behind making it work.

The same method that worked at scale works at home. Break the week of meals into bite-size pieces, so you can repeat the system weekly without burning mental energy. You’re wasting 120 hours a year on dinner otherwise. (read why)

The cost of skipping this habit it the $40 DoorDash scramble → bad sleep → foggy morning → hundreds of slightly worse decisions the next day. That compounds into a bad week, a bad month, a bad year.

These are meals you can cook off the top of your head. No endless Pinterest scrolling — searching for that perfect bookmarked recipe. And no flipping through hundreds of pages of cookbooks (you probably never use).

In the Coast Guard, I used 6–12 week cycle menus that fed my crew on deployments for months. I’d plan a full week of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then another week. Until I hit several weeks. It was a way to simplify planning for thousands of dollars of food inventory.

The home version is using theme nights that keep the rotation strong, repeatable, and easy to manage.

The category is fixed, but the recipe rotates. Jarred marinara and spaghetti one week, baked ziti the next. The structure kills the decision and the swap kills the boredom.

Start your own No-Decision Menu with one breakfast, one lunch, and one dinner. Write it down somewhere you'll actually reference — recipe name, ingredients, servings. If your baseline is cereal, do a little better in life. (kiddingggg) But build up to slightly more complex meals if this is you.

And as always. I’ll keep sending a No-Decision Menu every Saturday morning. These are recipes are built to stay simple and repeatable week after week.

Most people use the freezer as pure storage, but they're using it at 1% of the capacity they should be. The freezer-burned mystery item everyone has right now is proof there's no system behind it.

Cooking two servings on a weeknight, and eating two servings is the beginner play. Instead, you should cook one or two extra, freeze them — not for tomorrow's lunch, but for next week's emergency. This will build up your freezer as a true backup system over time.

The operating rule is to use a container, date label, and most importantly — FIFO.

First in, first out. Fresh goes behind old, pull from the front.

The brutal Thursday, where the backup meal saves you from the $40 order…it only takes 90 extra seconds of thought, repeated weekly. Read how to use your freezer as meal planning system to it’s full advantage here.

Stack these three habits and you’ll build a simple, repeatable meal planning system. You’ll be able to plug into it each week to reduce decision fatigue.

If you want to dive deeper into this system, watch the full video breakdown below.

P.S. The 60-Second Weeknight Dinner Planner does the Sunday dinner-planning step in about a minute. It’s the tool version of Habit 1 — same system, less work. And it’s only $9.