In a previous budgeting post, I shared that the best tool to manage your grocery spending is planning. Most anything that you spend time on planning will have a better outcome. Planning is the difference between success and happenstance. Planning is an underrated hack.
There’s something about hacks that bother me. We have to be careful of picking up the attitude or mindset that we can find shortcuts to everything. Some things can’t be abbreviated, outsourced, or distilled down to an easier process. Sometimes you have to take the hard approach, do the difficult thing, and do the right thing if you want a real outcome, a lasting habit, fulfillment, or satisfaction. The accelerated pace of the world we live in during this point in history often looks down upon something that requires a lot of work, takes a lot of time, or induces a lot of failure in the process of learning.
California has a law that if you want to get a divorce, you have to wait six months to file paperwork. What wisdom and yet a complete contrarian to the expectation in our culture that screams, “if I’ve made my decision, why should I have to wait any longer to move on?” This would prevent many from dating for at least six months until their divorce was official. Might be a good thing for someone exiting a broken marriage. I’m not a marriage or emotional health professional, but the point is, that’s a long time of saying no to the thing you may want to do and yes to the thing you probably should do. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts where the host invited an entrepreneur in the fitness and nutrition industry to discuss healthy habits. Much of their discussion revolved around the idea that everything is connected. Good sleep leads to good health, eliminating alcohol, regular exercise, and good eating habits lead to good sleep. There’s no shortcut around what we know and have known about human health for eternity – nutrition and fitness are critical elements. They went on to discuss our culture of avoiding the hard stuff by creating hacks and how short-sighted and ineffective that approach is. The host went so far as to say “you can’t ice bath your way out of a bottle of whiskey every night.” That’s exactly it. There are no shortcuts around the fundamentals in life. So stop looking! And instead spend the energy that you would watching endless Tik Tok videos doing the actual thing that’s proven to get you the actual result.
I recently listened to a sermon from a church that we love and have gleaned so much from over the last ten years. The message was highlighting how God created us, in his image, to be like him, who make order out of chaos. It highlighted how God, during the 6 days that he created all things, did exactly that – created divine order out of nothing. If you think about all the arenas in life where we have responsibility (work, home, relationships, volunteering, and so many more), our primary role in each of them is create order out of chaos. In our best form, we are creators just like our creator. How exciting!
Here are some methods of planning that we’ve found very helpful as we manage our life, our goals, our time, and our money.
- Vision Board
- Goal Setting
- Seasonal Bucket List
- Calendaring
- Budgeting
- Meal Planning
- Making a Grocery List
You can tackle each individually, but the interesting thing is that you’ll see how connected some are to another.
- Vision board > Goal Setting > Seasonal Bucket List > Calendaring
- Vision board > Goal Setting > Budgeting
- Budgeting > Meal Planning > Grocery Shopping
VISION BOARD
A vision board is usually a one-page document or a cork board that includes a lot of images representing things that you want your life to be about and long-term dreams that you have for your future. You can use a board, a statement, or a bulleted list – the form is less important. These aren’t trends, someone else’s ideas, or things that you’ve just recently thought about. Sometimes, they are the things that you’ve had deep in your heart for as long as you can remember. They’re the things you were created for. Other times, they can be things you’ve always found yourself gravitating toward as an adult. The point is they are what you will aim the direction of your life toward, so make sure you like them and that they deeply resonate with you. We were lucky enough to have someone older than us direct us toward developing a vision for our lives. It has been a critical starting point for both goal setting and financial planning.
GOAL SETTING
Goals are the things that you want to accomplish in a defined period of time. We like to set them annually and post them on the refrigerator, so that we can keep them in front of us. Some of your goals should take you closer to your vision. Others can be focused on personal development, things you’re interested in, physical challenges you want to set, etc. Goals will help you be thoughtful about how you spend your time. They’ll help you prioritize accomplishing the things that are important to you versus wasting time away on things that really don’t matter.
SEASONAL BUCKET LIST
These are just fun! We’ve started using them ahead of each of the four seasons to list out fun things that we want to accomplish in that season. I love it when life is seasonally driven, and I can adjust my activities to take full advantage of things that are only available in those months of the year. Summer feels like it’s only two months – July and August. That’s 8 weeks, and only 16 weekend days. When summer comes, I want to suck every last drop out of the vine-ripened tomatoes, local corn, hikes in the sub alpine, floats down the river casting an elk hair caddis or chubby Chernobyl toward rising trout. There’s no time like it. So, I write down the activities I love, make the sacrifice it takes to prepare for them and make an effort to put away the things that chop up my time into small meaningless bits that we like to call time confetti. Things like running errands that I can do much more efficiently, YouTube videos, social media, etc. Somehow those never make the seasonal bucket list.
CALENDARING
Everybody has a calendar that they manage, many of us have multiple calendars depending on how many responsibilities we have. And sometimes it feels like the calendar is managing to us rather than us managing the calendar. In seasons like summer, where my bucket list is long and time is limited, it helps if I calendar out everything I value most. Time is the most valuable resource we have and when we realize how limited it is, planning becomes a critical discipline to manage my most valuable resource. Then, when something comes up, I can say yes or no, and still feel like I managed what I did with my time versus someone else managing it for me, or summer just happening to me.
BUDGETING
I’ve talked a lot about budgeting on the blog already. What I will say in the context of planning is that budgeting is a tool to fuel our vision. Budgeting prioritizes our finances so that they’re specifically targeted at funding the most critical priorities we have. Like calendaring, it takes all your limited financial resources and directs them toward what is most important to you. So instead of spending whatever we want eating out without knowledge of what we’re spending, it targets every dollar toward what we envision for our future. This includes our seasonal bucket list – if we have a summer trip on that list, we fund it with our budget because it’s important to us. That could include anything you want to do. The point is you’re leveraging your finances, and creating a plan around them, so that you can financially do the things that are important to you.
MEAL PLANNING
Meal planning helps you prioritize your time – it minimizes trips to the grocery store. And it helps you prioritize your food budget. If you have the ingredients you need to cook a meal you like, you won’t be left scrambling at the end of the day, resorting to ordering takeout because who wants to go grocery shopping and then cook a meal after a busy workday?
GROCERY LIST
A grocery list is a direct outcome of meal planning. It’s hard to make an informed list without having a plan about what you’re going to cook. But if you can make a list, you can confidently shop knowing that what you put in your cart and what you spend your money on will be utilized efficiently. Ideally, you’ll have just what you need for the week ahead, nothing more and nothing less.