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You have seen what you have on hand.  Before that – and maybe still – you’ve gotten a good look at many, if not all, of your family’s recipes.  And you have an idea of what kind of recipes you’ll be making, with your weekly or monthly plan.  With this information in hand, make up a checklist for your pantry of items you want to have on hand at all times.  Make three sections – for dry/canned goods, refrigerator, and freezer.  Think about the things you make and what your family likes to eat – not just for meals, but what do you want to have on hand to quell the munchies or for after-school snacks or desserts.  It is my personal opinion that every kitchen should always have on hand the makings of at least one quick and well-liked meal and a good dessert or two.  Make sure you list both versatile basics, things like flour and sugar and the like that are used in a multitude of applications, and also one-recipe oddballs that keep well and *are used* in your family for a favorite recipe, things like marinated artichokes or canned pumpkin.

Then compare your list of reality and today’s list of ideals, and set up your shopping list to fill in the blanks.  Decide what to do with things you have that you don’t readily use – find recipes to try and add them to your upcoming menus, or donate the food, or if it’s been sitting there since the last millennium just toss it.

View previous Control Panel posts.

Before you can plan a menu, you have to know what you have.  Go to your pantries and take a complete inventory.  I don’t just mean the dry goods cupboard either.  Include your refrigerators and freezers as well.  If you’d like to take the opportunity to straighten and purge, feel free, but all we’re really after is a list of items you find.  If you find something tucked away in a corner that you don’t remember buying, don’t know what you’d use it for, and/or have never before eaten, you might want to rethink your shopping strategies, but that’s another topic entirely.  Speaking of shopping, a pantry inventory is very useful in preventing accidental over-buying.  If you plan to have chili dogs one week and assume you don’t have any chili since you made something else with it a couple of weeks ago, you would go and buy more.  A pantry inventory might reveal 4 cans of chili sitting in the back of the pantry, hiding behind the green beans.

Today is the fact-finding mission.  How do you want to record this in your Panel?  You could set aside some time (put it in your schedule) each week or month to take a complete inventory from scratch.  Or you could make up a master inventory sheet on which to keep track of what goes in and out.  Would that be attached to the refrigerator or a cabinet door, in a computer file, in a notebook…? Next we’ll determine what *should* be in your pantries.  No, not from some arbitrary list – that’s how you probably ended up with those odd things in the corners.

View previous Control Panel posts.

A weekly menu plan is basically the same as your Basic Week Plan, but for food.  Usually dinners are the main sticking point in a family, but if you struggle with breakfast and/or lunch also, consider doing the same thing for each meal.  Look at your weekly schedule, and determine a basic type of meal for each day of the week.  If you consistently have movie nights on Thursdays, you could have pizza those nights.  Or on days when you know you’ll be out running errands you could assign crockpot dinners.  Maybe set aside one day a week to try a new recipe.  If a weekly “schedule” of menus seems too restrictive, try a monthly scale instead.  But don’t assign meal types to each day in a month, just divide the number of days up into meal types – 9 chicken dinners, 5 meatless, 6 pasta, etc.  This is to avoid getting into a same-food rut over the course of a week or month.  The ultimate goal is to facilitate meal planning whether you like to do it by season, month, week, or day.

Are you a written menu by the month kind of person or fly by the seat of your pants with whatever you can pull out of the pantry/refrigerator/freezer right before dinner?

If you’re interested in seeing other’s plans, OrgJunkie has hundreds of people link up every Monday.  With my weekly menus I also come back and update each week with the reality of what we did eat each day, whether we stayed on course, and reviewing recipes to see how they worked (or not).

Previous Control Panel posts are here.  We’re now moving into more information storage and less planning and scheduling.  First up, food and kitchen details.

The basis of all food preparation is a recipe, even if it’s on the side of a box or in our heads.  But the bulk of recipes in the average family home are scribbled on index cards, scraps of papers, torn out of magazines, saved in email folders or text files, browser bookmarks, hidden in a collection of cookbooks, lying in drawers, hanging on refrigerators or kitchen cabinet doors, and crammed into file drawers or boxes.  How many times have you saved a recipe that looked good, only to never try it because you “filed” it away somewhere never to be seen again?  Or been stymied at dinner time because you have so many things to choose from you can’t decide and end up with macaroni and cheese *again*?

Since part of the control of our lives is planning menus for the day, week or month – as you like – a significant portion of our Control Panels should be given over to this task and the information that supports it.  The first step is to get a handle on the recipe explosion.

First and foremost, decide how you would like to access your recipes henceforth.  Do you prefer a binder with sheet protectors, a card file, a set of computer files, a commercial recipe program, or something else entirely?  One caveat: If you choose to store your recipes on a computer or PDA, *please* consider creating a backup storage option of printouts, at least of family favorites.  Few things are worse than an inopportune (are they ever anything but?) computer crash that deletes Grandma’s holiday recipes two days before Thanksgiving.

Now, collect from around the house any recipes that are not already in your chosen format and copy them correctly.  If you use recipes from the back of a food package, copy it into your system, just in case the company changes package design.  Nestle will probably always print the Tollhouse cookie recipe on bags of chocolate chips, but you never know.  If you don’t already, make a place specifically for your cookbooks near where you will store personal recipes (or vice versa).  If there are recipes in your books that you reference frequently, consider adding them to your system for easier retrieval, and to protect your books from kitchen hazards.

Please don’t be perfection-happy about this.  If you are keeping index cards in a file or pages in a notebook, don’t fret about the format or ink color.  The key to a workable recipe collection is accessibility, not handwriting style.

How you group recipes is a matter largely of personal preference.  If you practice batch/investment/freezer cooking, you may want to group recipes by main ingredient rather than meal or dish type.  Or you could have all grill recipes together, all casseroles, all skillet meals, etc.  Check your cookbooks’ layouts to see what you like best.

Chances are this will take you more than today.  For some people, this will take an hour a day for the next two weeks – or more.  That’s ok.  What’s important today is to get the system set up and begin compiling.  The end goal is an accessible, working recipe collection that is an asset and an aid in planning menus and preparing meals, rather than a time trap that sucks you in by making you search for the one recipe you need.  So get your design going and spend some time today working on it.

See previous Control Panel posts here.

Somewhere between lofty goals and basic chores usually fall our creative pursuits.  Sometimes the ambitious of us list crafts and the like as long-term goals, and sometimes we’re persistent enough to treat them like daily chores.  But I’m willing to bet that most of us either don’t have our creative hobbies listed as goals – or if we do, they have a low priority.  And probably a few don’t even believe they have a creative bent.  It is my belief that not only should everyone have a creative outlet, but that each and every one of us is capable of it in some manner.  Do you like to take photos, scrap photos, write sonnets or stories, paint, play music (beyond pressing play on the computer), grow petunias, sew, bake, build birdhouses, throw clay (and I don’t mean at the wall, though that’s certainly tempting sometimes), knit, crochet, make macramé…  You get the idea – there’s something out there for you, I’m sure of it.

If you had creative projects on your goal lists earlier, good for you!  Take some time today to work on them.  If you’re like the rest of us, and your pursuits slipped through the cracks, or were too low on the priority list to be planned already, today is the day.  Note, this is not the Hobbies section of your Control Panel.  Today I only want you to plan out the steps required to complete a single creative project.  Set a deadline goal, determine your resource requirements, plan it into your schedule, just like the other goals this week.  If you want to needlepoint a Santa pillow before next Christmas (a project I’ve had sitting on my shelf for the last 6 or 7 years, no lie), estimate your total time investment, divide that by the time between now and then, and commit yourself to a minimum amount of time per day or per week.

See previous Control Panel posts here.

It’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty, in determining what it will actually take to complete your goals.

First things first.  Choose five of your goals.  Which ones?  Why, the most important ones, of course!  You’ve determined which of these they were.  If you numbered your list, take the top five.  If you used ABC priorities, choose any five A’s.

Expand on your goal statement.  Break it down into a series of steps required to get you to completion.  For that matter, make sure you define “completion” clearly for yourself.  If you want to climb Mount Everest, for example, is it enough to simply reach the summit?  Or do you want to plant a flag, take photographic evidence, keep a journal of your progress, etc?

Back to the steps to get there; list everything you can think of that will be working towards your goal.  There will probably be things that come up later that you didn’t anticipate, that’s ok.  Plan what you can now while you’re sitting in your easy chair so you have fewer surprises that threaten to derail you.  Put the steps in a logical order, and assess time and resource requirements.  Then sit down with your Control Panel and fit these steps into your actual life.  Oh, you don’t have time for your big dreams in your life?  I “don’t have time” to write a novel right now either – I’ve got 4 kids and a myriad of other obligations myself – but I do have time to write a character backstory or a few pages at night when the kids are in bed and my chores are done.  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step – and it continues that way too, one step at a time.

Have you heard the story about filling the chest?  You start with cannonballs, and a few fit in and it seems full.  But then you can fit some baseball-sized rocks in the gaps and it’s fuller still.  Even so, many pebbles can still be squeezed into the space between.  After that, a whole lot of sand can be poured into the chest.  What was full still had much space to be filled.  So it is with our lives.  I look at it two ways.  One interpretation is that if you start with the small stuff, the minutiae, the day to day recurrent nothing we fill our days with – the sand – there won’t be enough room for the important things, the big stuff – the rocks and cannonballs.  On the other hand, one could say that the things we already do are the cannonballs.  Life looks full and we say we don’t have time for anything else.  But our large goals can be broken down into small and smaller pieces to be fit in around our other activities, like the pebbles and sand.  Take it as you like, they both work.

For those first five goals, set out the steps to get there, starting with wherever you are.  Add those steps to your daily life so you are actively working towards things that are actually important to you.  Give yourself timelines and deadlines.  If money is an obstacle, and you can’t yet move forward, plan instead how to raise the resources, and plan to keep track of your monetary progress and work toward beginning your goal.  It’s all the same process, and it all takes small steps to reach large distances.

View prior Control Panel posts here.

Now that your goals are on paper (or computer), depending on the kind of person you are they probably seem either more daunting or more doable.  Hopefully the latter.

Take your goals to be, do, see, and have, and spend a few moments prioritizing them.  It might seem a little silly or impossible to put gradient priorities on your dreams and goals, but I’ll wager they’re not of identical importance after all if you stop and think about it.  Isn’t it more important to you to visit your grandparents’ hometown you’ve heard stories of all your life (for example) than the fun beach resort you saw on tv last week?  They can both be goals, but when it comes right down to it and one has to be let go, you’ll rest easier knowing you let go of the less important one.

There are two basic ways to prioritize a list of items.  One is to number each one uniquely in order of importance.  Then you work your way down the list from the most important (#1) to the least (#104 or whatever).  This works for some people who can see all the infinite shades of grey – these are usually people who appreciate 20 buttons on a blender, if you know what I mean.  The simpler, in my opinion, way to do it is to use A, B, and C (or 1, 2, and 3 if you’re numerically inclined).  The way I read these designations is A *must* be done, B *should* be done, and C *could* be done.

If you use the number priorities (1 to infinity), the other choice to make is whether to number each list separately or lump them all together.  This is really a “whatever floats your boat” issue, but I’ll offer this: If most of your goals have some kind of money requirement, purchasing supplies, plane tickets, whatever, I would put them all on one list so you can better plan your resource allocation.  But that’s just me.

View all previous Control Panel posts here.

With goals to be, see, do, and have set, the next step is to plan how to reach those goals.  Goals without a plan will just sit there and so will you.

Think about *how* you plan to achieve your goals, and how you plan to track your progress.  Lay the foundation for that by setting up a part of your Panel for such plans.  Will you need financial records and charts, blueprints, idea files, timelines, delegation charts, research files, shopping lists, checklists, weightloss charts or more?  Find or make a place for them now, before they become so much unuseful clutter.  Once that is done you can start incorporating action steps into your active Control Panel and increase your chances of completing them.

See previous posts here.

If you know what you want to be in life, then you can decide on some other goals.

You’ve seen lists people have of things to do before they’re 30, 40, 50, dead, whatever.  Bucket lists, they’re often called.  Do you have one?  Can you think of anything you’d like to accomplish in life?  Some adventure experience, travel, etc.?  Pick an appropriate benchmark for yourself and set some ambitious goals.  This is a place to dare to dream.

Next (or as part of the above), expand your horizons and picture places you’d like to visit.  Want to take your kids to the campground your parents vacationed at when you were young?  Want to see the Mona Lisa in Paris or the pyramids in Egypt?  Are you a sucker for the natural beauty of glaciers and virgin forests, or an urban explorer looking to hike the streets of San Francisco?   Ambitious enough to visit every country in Europe or Asia, or every state in the US?  Make your wish list today.

Now the materialistic side of our dreams: those things we want to acquire in life.  Not necessarily just the huge things either – need a new garage door opener?  How about a clothes dryer?   It’s not a pipe dream, but it’s too big for the weekend’s shopping list.  It might help you to walk through your home, triggering thoughts of what you’d like to have to fix or enhance each room.  Go ahead and pipe dream if that’s what you like – but I would caution you to keep in mind the concept of “enough”.  Is it really necessary to be a millionaire – and live like one – to be happy?  Not that I’d turn down a million dollars, mind you!  Far from it, but a million dollar portfolio isn’t on my goal list, because it’s not something I need for a happy life.  Only you know what your personal priorities are so I’ll only say be cautious of going overboard, and have fun dreaming!

Previous posts available here.

Now you have the bones of your Control Panel set up, your regular tasks filed neatly so you know what needs to be done when, and you’ve established flexibility in those parts of your Control Panel.  There is more to a Control Panel than things you have to do.  Much, much more.  Filing information so it can be referenced and found easily is the primary purpose of a Control Panel, and the next thing I want to cover that you’ll want to have accessible to you is a written set of goals.

Sit down with yourself and put into words what you want to be in life.  This is not the place for things to have or places to go, those will come later.  Right now articulate how you want yourself to be.  I think of it this way – When your children are grown (or when your obituary is written) what do you want to be remembered for?  How would your children, spouse, friends, acquaintances describe you in the ideal future?  What personality traits or habits do you want to foster, or conversely rid yourself of.  This is a day for introspection, so grab yourself a quiet moment and a nice drink of your choice and think for a while.  Then write a few statements that you can put in your Control Panel to refer back to when you need a little course correction.