Really Useful Time Management Tips from a
Cooking Show
by:
Inez Ng
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.
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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.
Often times we do things a
certain way because that was how we were taught. The sad truth is, how
we were taught might not be the best solution anymore. Technology is
changing everyday and there are so many more resources available to us
now that were unheard of even a generation ago. The more steps there
are in a process, the more opportunities there are for errors. Look at
what you are working on and how you are completing the task and try to
simplify it if at all possible. A direct result of that is improved
efficiency, which results in more time for you.
Now you have the time management
lessons I’ve learned from the cooking show. Apply them and
see what a difference they make to your day. And if you’re
cooking, I’ll be right over.
Copyright 2005 Inez Ng
