Reading Planning Instead of Meal Planning
A weekend practice + a peek at an upcoming new project
Housekeeping note: The previous link I provided for guest posts pitches wasn’t working. It has now been fixed, writers who are interested in pitching a guest post can find more information here.
I am shaking up how the publishing schedule works a bit. Don’t worry, it’s just a little bit. I’ve thought and thought (okay, ruminated) about how to offer a paid essay each month. While reading the book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz, I realized I was making this all too complicated. I will be sharing Klotz’s work in the future unrelated to publishing schedules, so stay tuned for that. The 4th Monday of the month essay will be a paid essay. That’s it, the only change. Instead of offering an additional essay each month, one Monday essay will become a paid essay. I love this space, and so much of what I provide here is free, and I don’t plan to change that. This allows me to offer some different things to paid subscribers while not adding MORE to my workload and your inboxes. I appreciate being entrusted with your emails. There is so much going on right now, and I am not sure MORE is what we need. The paid essays will come with a preview, so there will be something to consider even if you are not a paid subscriber.
February is the month of love, and today’s essay is an idea related to love in a way—the love of reading. It’s a fun practice I fell into, and it also provides a peek into a new project I am working on for all A Wonderful Mess readers for the spring.
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What to eat this week?
The praises of meal planning are sung throughout the internet. There are all kinds of different versions of meal planning. There are the make-ahead models, the routine model where you eat the same thing on a specific day of the week, or maybe you simply have certain recipes slotted for each night. But the overall idea is planning for what you and your family will eat. Some people love meal planning, or maybe love is too strong a word, but they find it to be a meaningful practice. I’ve had varying degrees of meal planning success in the past. There are periods of early motherhood that I am truly unsure how we ate. My husband doesn’t remember either, but somehow we got here today. The general purpose of meal planning is to:
Reduce decision fatigue—who wants to figure out what to cook at the end of the day?
Make sure you have the supplies that you need—you need to buy the spaghetti to make the spaghetti and meatballs
Use your brain when you theoretically have more attention to make choices to support your needs—if you want to have more than bread for dinner (which, for the record, is a delicious dinner), a more rested brain can make choices to support that goal
Support your financial needs—less buying of too many veggies to only have them rot in the fridge
Respect time constraints of fluctuating schedules—knowing ahead of time that the night with all the school events that start at 5PM!!! will not be the night for a nice, slow dinner prep.
Photo by Kim Deachul on Unsplash
Despite all these helpful points, I am not here to share any great wisdom on meal planning, the internet can do that for you. Just Google meal planning and set aside hours to read about it. No, I want to talk about something more fun (at least to me), reading planning.
What is reading planning?
Eating is an important facet of life but for some of us, reading is really important, too. So, what if we started reading planning?