From what I hear, grocery shopping is an abhorred task for many people. If you operate a business, you might find it especially annoying to take time out of your busy day to buy food.

I happen to love grocery shopping, and I’ve devised a system that makes my weekly shop very efficient.

First of all, plan ahead. Take about a half hour or so of down time to go through your recipes and cookbooks to select the meals that you will make through the week. Plan for 6 nights worth of dinners and select dishes that make good leftovers (think roast chicken for Monday so you can have leftovers in a sandwich for lunch the next day and a pot pie for Tuesday’s dinner, etc.) Write down plans for lunch as well and plan leftovers as much as you possibly can.

Now you simply make a list of the items you will need to make all of your meals for one week. It’s very frustrating to be thinking for days about that chicken pot pie you’re going to make and then realize that you are out of mushrooms - the ingredient that makes it so special.

I am a dork - I make my list according to the route I take through the grocery store. This saves some time as I do my shopping. BEFORE you get to the checkout, check your list to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

If you use a system like this, you can save money and time. You will also eliminate those daily trips to the market for those last minute items that you need to prepare dinner.

Another way to make your grocery trip shorter? Definitely leave your kids at home.

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My name is Jaime Lee Mann, welcome to my blog. I am going to get pretty personal here with my inaugural post and share with you an incredibly dumb thing that I just did.

I’m a business owner, as you probably are if you are reading this. I have come to a point in my business where I need my own virtual assistants to help me both with client work and my own administrative stuff. That point was made evidently clear just ten minutes ago.

I decided to work late last night so that I could have some time freed up today to work on my own business, do some laundry and spend some time with my family. I was sitting at my computer until after 1:00am and I was awakened twice between then and 6:00am by each of my daughters - not a very restful sleep. I left my 3 month old daughter in her crib and plunked my 2 year old daughter on the couch with a movie and turned on my computer at 6:30. As I did a ’send/receive’ for new email, I put on a pot of coffee and sat down furiously typing while the coffee brewed and I had a quiet moment.

I thought the coffee maker sounded a bit different than it usually does, but I was in a groove and too distracted by the email I was typing to pay much attention. Finally the coffee maker sounded like it had bad gas so I got up and realized that I worked too late last night. My precious coffee was spilling out everywhere, not contained by the empty pot that I had left sitting on the stove next to the coffee maker.

I should have sent the project I was working on last night to one of my associate VAs to complete for me but I wanted to get it done. I figured since the house was quiet and everyone was in bed I could be productive and get it out of the way. Well it’s almost done, but I’m going to take a bit longer getting going this morning as a result!

What’s the moral of the story? If you don’t want to risk having your coffee brewed directly on to your counter, consider outsourcing to a virtual assistant!

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