When you’re looking to automate aspects of your life, it’s a good idea to start with the low-hanging fruit – those tasks that take up a lot of your time that can be easily automated. One of the biggest time-consuming tasks for many people, especially moms, is grocery shopping and meal planning, which happens to be one of the easiest things to automate.

1. Meal Planning

Meal kits are a convenient, time-saving, and varied way to prepare meals at home, especially helpful for avoiding grocery store trips. Thankfully, there are many options available nowadays, depending on where you live. Here are a few meal kit delivery options:

Blue Apron: A well-known meal kit service that offers a variety of recipes, including vegetarian and family-friendly options. They use fresh ingredients and provide step-by-step recipe cards to make meal preparation easy.

HelloFresh: Provides a variety of meal options to fit various dietary preferences, including vegetarian, pescatarian, and low-calorie options. Their meals take around 30 minutes to prepare and use fresh ingredients.

Sun Basket: A meal kit service that focuses on using organic, non-GMO ingredients in their meals. They offer a variety of meal plans, including paleo, gluten-free, and vegetarian options.

Other options: Purple Carrot, Home Chef, Freshly, Gobble.

Bonus: If you have a preteen or teen, put them to work! Once a week, they can cook dinner! Meal kit instructions are easy to follow, and meals are easy to make.

Potential Concerns:

• $$$$ Cost: Meal kits can be expensive, but when you consider the current grocery store prices and the time you save, you will come out ahead. It’s like hiring a cleaner: you can do it yourself, but it’s worth it to hire one for your well-being. If your partner is not on board, tell them they can make dinners going forward and see if it saves money! One way we saved money was by ordering two-person meal plans instead of four. The kids eat like birds, and it helped us control our portion sizes for dinner, ultimately making us healthier.
• 🩺 🩺 🩺  Healthy Options: HelloFresh wasn’t really for us. I thought it was too family-friendly. I ended up opting for another service that I thought offered healthier options. I am sure you can find one in your area if you look hard, too.
• 👦👦👦 Kids Won’t Eat It: You should not plan your dinners around what your kid will eat. They won’t starve if they don’t have dinner, I promise! The rule of thumb in our house is if the kids don’t like the dinner we have, the only other option is steamed frozen veggies. I grab it from the freezer, heat it in the microwave, and voila! If they don’t want it, then they are done till breakfast. Put your foot down on this, not only will it encourage them to try new foods, but once they are used to it, it will cause less drama at the dinner table.

2. Grocery shopping

Well, you just took care of dinners. But what about everything else? Breakfast, lunches, staples, snacks? I have one word for you: subscription! You may need to stitch together two solutions for this one: one for dry goods and one for fresh stuff.

I use a local farm delivery for fresh produce and Amazon for dry goods. So, I automatically get things like fruit baskets, vegetables, yogurt, and bread weekly, and things like toilet paper, toothpaste, paper towels, and garbage bags from Amazon monthly or less. Of course, these are not all the options.

Here is a good selection of what’s happening:

Dry goods: Amazon, Walmart, Thrive, Boxed, Brandless
Produce: FreshDirect, WholeFoods, Shipt, Imperfect Foods
In Canada:
🍁 Spud, Fresh City Farms, Mama Earth Organics, Amazon, Well.ca 🍁

3. Daily Cleaning/Upkeep

It took me some time to embrace this task, but once I did, I never looked back. Four years ago, I bought our first Roomba and it has been a game changer. It vacuums and mops the floors while we sleep. It’s the kids’ responsibility to make sure the floor is clear of toys for the “robot” every night, and they take this task seriously because they don’t want the robot to “eat their toys.” This makes our monthly cleaning routine so much easier, and waking up to a clean house is a great feeling. Roombas can be expensive, but there are many options available.

4. Bill Payments and Savings

I would be surprised if most of you are not already doing this in some way. Auto bill payments and auto savings are not new, but they can significantly impact our finances by preventing outrageous late fees, protecting our credit score, and building wealth.

Our minds work in a funny way; we prefer to do little bits at a time rather than investing one big chunk of time at once, even though it’s better. My favorite blogger, Tim, can tell you a thing or two about that.

Once you set up auto savings for $100 per month and forget about that money, it’s not an inconvenience for you. Your brain accepts that $100 is gone.

We will discuss these more in detail and many other things you can do to save time by automating tasks. But I wanted to start with these four because they are the easiest to implement, making them a great place to start. If you have any additional suggestions, please let me know!