How to Stop Deciding Dinner Every Day

In our house, making dinner has always been the least of our worries. We know how to cook the things we like. What wore us down was the deciding: the same question every afternoon, asked at the moment when nobody has the energy to answer it.

If that sounds familiar, the fix isn't a better recipe or a faster cooking method. It's moving the decision somewhere else.

Why the daily decision is so tiring

"What's for dinner?" looks like a small question, but it comes with a lot attached. What do we have at home? What did we eat yesterday? Does anyone need to go to the shop? Will the kids eat it? And it lands late in the day, when you're hungry and tired.

Answer that seven times a week and it adds up. The cooking takes the same time either way. The deciding is the part you can actually get rid of.

Decide once a week, not seven times

The simplest change is to decide the whole week in one sitting. Pick a moment when you're not hungry and not in a rush, like Sunday afternoon or whenever you do your big shop, and put a dinner on each day.

After that, the evening question has a boring answer: whatever's on the plan. Boring is the goal.

You don't need to plan all seven days on day one. Start with three or four. Leave the nights you know you'll eat out, or that are always chaotic, blank. The habit builds from there.

Pick from a list, not from scratch

Planning a week goes from painful to quick when you choose from a list instead of a blank page. Most households already have a set of dinners they rotate through. We certainly did. We just never wrote it down, so every week we had to remember it from scratch.

Write down the dinners you already make and plan from that list. I wrote more about this in You don't need new recipes and in how to keep a family dinner rotation.

Make it someone's job, and not always the same person's

When nobody owns the decision, it lands on whoever cares most about dinner actually happening. In our house that was usually my wife, and it wasn't fair.

Planning works better when everyone suggests a few dinners and the others agree or swap. I wrote about how we split it in how couples decide what to eat every week.

Put a reminder on it

This was the piece I personally needed. I'm the analytical one, and I like systems, but a plain calendar reminder saying "plan dinner" was easy for me to swipe away. What worked was a reminder tied to the plan itself: one that only shows up when tonight's dinner isn't decided yet, and opens the plan when I tap it.

That's how Dinnerbord's Remind me daily to plan dinner notification works. It gets me to suggest something before the decision ends up with my wife again.

The grocery list falls out of it

Once the week is decided, the shopping list is just the ingredients of those dinners added together. No more wandering the aisles trying to remember what you were going to cook. See how to turn a weekly meal plan into a grocery list.

Try it

You can plan a week in Dinnerbord's free dinner planner without creating an account. It comes with a set of starter recipes, gives you ideas for each day, and builds the grocery list for you. When you want to plan together with your household, create an account.