Twenty minutes later you're ordering delivery again. This has nothing to do with your level of discipline. It’s all about your system (or lack of).

In the Coast Guard, we ran what’s called a cycle menu. Learning how to do it right was an entire course in Culinary school.

Before a long deployment, I'd plan out 10 weeks of breakfast, lunch, and dinner in advance. When we hit week 10, we cycled back to week 1. Sometimes we'd run through the whole thing two or three times before pulling back into home port.

Nobody complained (too much) or tossed me overboard over the meatloaf repeating every 2.5 months. The crew was fed, fueled, and focused on the mission.

You don't need to go that deep at home to figure out dinners. But you can use the same method dialed down to a single week for one or more people.

Most of you say weeknight dinners are what trips them up the most when it comes to meal planning. And I get why. You’re busy all day and the last thing you want to do is figure out dinner.

Recently I’ve spent a ton of time beefing up one of my recent creations, after reading through some of your replies to this newsletter and on social media. I created a tool meant to save you time on that pesky weeknight dinner scramble.

The entire workflow is based on what I teach you each week. The difference is that this planner does the work for you. In 60 seconds.

Check it out below.

Here's how the Coast Guard cycle menu works at the household level.

Write down 5–10 meals you already know how to make — recipes you could cook blindfolded and recite the ingredients half asleep. Think even distribution across breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Bonus points if some of them can be batch cooked or made ahead.

That list becomes your go-to rotation.

Some weeks you'll use all of it. Some weeks you'll only pull from half. Either way, you're never starting from zero.

This is exactly what the No-Decision Menu section in each newsletter is built for. No fluff recipes, typically under 30 minutes, short ingredient lists. Not because I ran out of ideas — but because those are the meals worth repeating.

You can browse past newsletters to build your list from previous recipes, or bring your own. Either works.

Once you have your rotation, planning the week takes about 10 minutes. You're just plugging meals into slots. No extra decisions required.

That's the whole point. Less deciding. More doing.