In my family, every Thursday is meant to be the day we plan meals for the upcoming week. My mom reminds me and my dad to put down what we want to cook in a shared notes document — a simple task that sounds easy in theory, but rarely happens the way it should. We procrastinate, forget, or put it off until it’s too late. By the time grocery shopping day arrives, we realize that the document is incomplete or entirely empty. This turns what should be a straightforward grocery run into a rushed and stressful experience. Without a clear plan, we wander through the store guessing what we might want to eat, often buying too much of some things and forgetting key ingredients for meals we half-decided on. It’s inefficient, expensive, and exhausting.

The chaos doesn’t end with shopping. When it’s finally time to cook, the same panic returns. We’re stuck asking:
"What’s there to eat?"
"What are we making today?"
"Do we even have everything we need?"

Instead of feeling organized and ready, we feel pressured and frustrated. Cooking, which should be a moment of comfort and connection, becomes a chore weighed down by indecision and missing ingredients. Meals get delayed, tension rises, and the energy that should go into enjoying food and time together gets drained away by the sheer mental load of having no plan.

This repeated cycle — forgetting to plan, scrambling to shop, scrambling to cook — creates a constant, low-level stress in our home. It turns something as basic and essential as eating into a source of unnecessary daily friction, week after week.