It’s simple to breakdown once you really think about it.

These 30 minutes can kill your momentum dead — right when you need it most.

Last Monday at 5 pm, I opened the pantry to grab a jar of marinara sauce for our typical easy pasta meal to get the week started smooth. But the little stinkin jar had just vanished somewhere between the store and my pantry.

Searched the car, all the odd spots, and nothing. Couldn’t be found.

Now it’s 5:10 and I know we have to leave by 6 pm to help host Trivia Night at my local American Legion. Luckily we had a few ingredients in the fridge I was able to throw together to make a garlic lemon pasta. But, it took me 30 minutes extra once it was all done and cleaned up.

Now we’re rushing out the door, without any time to decompress between work and hosting an event. Probably why I burnt some of the little pizzas we served. (whoops)

This is an example of what happens when you don’t have the right ingredients for your planned weeknight meal.

I built a free tool that takes the guesswork out of dinner in 60 seconds — more on that at the end. You can use it here.

30 minutes × 5 nights = 2.5 hours. That's what this system buys back.

This is just accounting time for dinner too, not including all your other meals. So you can imagine how much time this process can save in the long run.

I’ll break it down into 3 simple steps you can repeat each week.

Most people skip this part, but it’s the most important part.

Sit down with anyone in your household to figure out what your plans are this coming week. Do you have any obligations that conflict with your typical meal times?

Tuesday night you’re having dinner with friends out which means you don’t need to worry about cooking anything. Thursday night you have a book club that starts at 6:30 pm — meaning you’ll need something made ahead of time, so you can eat quickly before your meeting.

Write all of these conflicts on a notepad so you can reference for the next steps.

This is where your No-Decision Menu (read more) comes into play.

Reference your go-to meals while looking at your plan for the week. That Thursday night book club needs a meal you can cook ahead of time, so make sure one recipe is something you can either batch cook Sunday or make extra servings earlier in the week.

Make sure to include at least one night of planned takeout food as well for one of your more busy nights. Or if you’re free all week, still do this to give yourself a break from the kitchen and food decisions.

Map out your meals for the week by the amount of servings needed. Do you have 4 people to feed Thursday night? Make a note.

Do this for every meal you need to cook and do the quick math for how much of each ingredient you’ll need to add to your list. The next part is important for your shopping experience to be more efficient.

Group your ingredients by categories:

This simple tactic will speed up your time in the grocery store — which makes the store faster to get in and out of.

Keep in mind the first time you do these 3 steps it might take a bit longer than 10-minutes. But, as you stay consistent with this system it becomes very easy to repeat each week. The same system scales to every meal once the dinner habit is locked in.

Each meal you plan during the week buys you back those 30 minutes of wasted food decisions, so you have the mental capacity for the decisions that actually matter.

You can also use a free tool I made with this process in mind, to speed things up. Plan your entire week’s dinners in 60 seconds with my free dinner planner. It’s populated with 21 go-to recipes and gives you an automated grocery list as well.

Forward this to someone who could use two hours back in their week.