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.
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
