In life, there are lessons available to use everywhere.
We just have to have our eyes open to spot them. I have picked up some
really useful time-management tips from watching a cooking show. Suspend
your disbelief and let me explain further.
I don’t watch a lot of television because it can be a
huge time drain. But I enjoy experimenting and cooking, so I do watch
a few cooking shows now and then. One of my favorites is “30 Minute Meals”
hosted by the ever perky Rachel Ray. Her claim to fame is that she can
show you how to prepare healthy, great-tasting home-cooked meals in 30
minutes. Who can resist that?
After experiencing more than a few episodes of her program,
I’ve come to realize that she is a master at using time. That’s how she
can get so much accomplished in 30 minutes. And here are her “secrets”
that you can easily adopt.
Spend time in Planning
Most cooking shows lasting 30 minutes will feature maybe
one item. In “30 Minute Meals”, Rachel Ray generally prepares three to
five items working alone in her kitchen. She doesn’t have helpers and
the ingredients haven’t been pre-chopped or diced or julienned ahead of
time. She doesn’t have another perfect soufflé sitting in the oven waiting
for her to whip out at the end to show you how it should turn out. She
really does the cooking in “real time.” So how does she do it?
Before Rachel Ray even steps foot into her kitchen, she
has the entire process for preparing the meal planned out. Does the dessert
take longer to cook than the entree? If so, then it makes perfect sense
to start the preparation of the dessert first. She knows which sequence
of steps is the most efficient based on the planning. She knows exactly
which ingredients she needs from the refrigerator so that she only needs
to make one trip, which saves her time.
So, here’s our real life application. When you look at
your list of things to do, or errands to run, how can you use planning
to become more efficient? How many “trips to the refrigerator” can you
save by improving your planning?
Utilize Every Minute
This may sound like a no-brainer, but how many of us
are really experts at this like Rachel Ray. She constantly talks about
her “pockets of time.” When the water is heating up for pasta, she uses
her pocket of time to chop onions, butter bread, cut up chicken, and anything
else she can fit in. By using these little pockets of time, she whips
up a meal in 30 minutes.
Now for our real life application: how many times have
you put off doing something because you only had 15 minutes and the task
takes an hour? What if you can’t find a whole hour to work on that task
for another week, but you can actually squeeze in 15 minutes everyday
for the next 4 days? By using your little pockets of time, you are able
to complete the task this week instead of next week. That’s the secret
to getting more done.
Become a master at this like Rachel Ray. If you only
have 10 minutes before you have to go to a meeting, return one phone call.
This gives you the perfect incentive to be efficient about concluding
the call. Pick up pockets of time everywhere and see how much more you
can accomplish during your day.
Simplify whenever possible
Rachel was making a creamy tomato soup one day. Everybody
knows that home-made soup takes hours. What was she thinking? Instead
of putting in whole tomatoes and letting then cook for hours and then
straining and blending the mixture, she put canned tomatoes with some
garlic and celery into a food processor, and added the mixture into her
pot of hot milk. She simplified the process! Some gourmet will probably
shudder at the thought, but the soup looked pretty appetizing to me, and
I’m sure it is much better than opening up a can of Campbell’s.
