Start Every Day With a Lunch Plan
Almost everyone in this world can be divided into two categories: lunch people, and everyone else.
By “lunch people,” I mean people who see it as a treat rather than a fuel stop, who structure their days around their lunch break, who are baffled when someone claims they were so busy they forgot to eat. I am a lunch person. My husband is not. And in our house divided, both of us have benefited enormously from having a lunch plan.
The lunch plan is a practice that we began in late October, back when voting plans were a consistent topic of conversation. Do you know how you’ll be getting to the polls? What time are you going? A lunch plan is the same thing, except with a midday meal instead of democracy: Here’s something you know you’re going to do in the near future, so save yourself some cognitive stress down the road by mapping out your logistics ahead of time.
A good lunch plan addresses both the what and the when. Take a few minutes in the morning to do a quick scan of your fridge and your calendar. Make note of what you have and when you’ll have a window to prepare and eat it. Lunch people will avoid the dreaded scenario of making it to noon only to realize the leftovers they’d been banking on have gone bad. Non-lunch people will not suddenly look at the clock as the sun is setting, shrug, and resolve to just wait for dinner. And before your workday even starts, you have one thing you’ve already taken off of your, ahem, plate.
