How to Meal Plan for a Week in 20 Minutes

Meal planning has a reputation for being the preserve of the impossibly organised, with colour-coded spreadsheets and a month mapped out in advance. It does not have to be like that. A loose plan for the week ahead, put together in about twenty minutes, is enough to save money, cut waste and free you from the daily decision of what to cook. Here is a routine anyone can follow.

Start with the week, not the recipes

Before choosing a single dish, look at the shape of your week. Which evenings are busy? When will you be home late, or out altogether? Is there a night someone has training, or a day you work from home and have more time? Matching meals to reality is the whole game: a slow braise on a frantic Tuesday is a plan that will fail, while a fifteen-minute pasta is a plan that will hold.

Shop your own kitchen first

Open the fridge, freezer and cupboards and note what needs using up and what you already have. Building a couple of meals around the half-bag of spinach and the lonely chicken thighs already in the fridge is where meal planning saves the most money and waste. Plan to use what you own before you buy anything new.

Pick a realistic number of meals

You almost never need seven new dinners. Account for leftovers, a takeaway night, and the evening you will inevitably eat out or graze. Planning four or five actual cooked meals for a week is plenty for most households, and it leaves welcome slack. Over-planning is why so many plans collapse by Wednesday.

Lean on a shortlist of trusted recipes

The fastest planners are not endlessly hunting for new dishes. They draw most of the week from a rotating shortlist of meals they know work, with perhaps one new recipe to keep things interesting. Keep a list of your reliable dinners somewhere you can see it, and planning becomes picking from a menu rather than starting from a blank page.

• Aim for variety across the week: a couple of veg-forward meals, something with fish, a comforting one-pot.
• Repurpose deliberately: roast a large chicken on Sunday and plan to use the rest in a Monday traybake or soup.
• Build in one "anything goes" night to use up odds and ends.

Turn the plan straight into a shopping list

The plan only saves you a second trip to the shops if it becomes a list. Go through your chosen meals, note what each needs, and cross off anything you already have. Grouping the list by aisle or section makes the actual shop faster too. A tool that generates the list from your recipes automatically, combining duplicate ingredients, turns this from a chore into a click.

A plan that fits your real week beats a perfect plan you will abandon by Wednesday.

Keep what worked

At the end of the week, take thirty seconds to note which meals were a hit and which were a faff. Over a few weeks this builds a tried-and-tested rotation that makes each future plan faster than the last. Twenty minutes on a Sunday, and the question of what is for dinner is answered before it is ever asked.