Tips for the Kitchen

I know that I play the same tune over and over – “Forget about the tips, focus on the fundamentals” and that I think most of us are making a mistake by focusing on tips when we look to improve our productivity. Here is an example of what I mean when I think about focusing on the wrong things.

This comes from a newsletter I subscribe to that sends out a series on improving one’s productivity.


Time Saving Tips For Your Kitchen from PlanYourTimeNow.comAre you spending too much time in your kitchen? Would you like to have a lot more time to spend on your children, or simply to pamper yourself, chill out or relax? Well, if you follow some of these time saving kitchen tips, you will find yourself with some extra time that you can use for any purpose that you want.

Let’s look at some of these time saving tips:

  1. Read and familiarise yourself with the recipe before you start your cooking. Many times, you will waste time rereading the recipe and instructions, while in the middle of preparing the ingredients, and while cooking. By reading up on the ingredients and method before you start, it will be fresh in your mind and you can save time looking at the instructions.
  2. If your pots and pans, bowls or chopping boards keep sliding off the counter top, then you need this tip. Save some time putting back all these items in their correct positions while preparing your meal, by simply placing a piece of damp cloth underneath them. They will no longer slide off the top, and you do not have to worry about cleaning up the mess.
  3. Do you take a lot of time peeling the skin off of your garlic cloves? One way is to cut them in two and peel them of. They will come off easier. However, I just learned this from a friend, and it works much better. Just put your garlic cloves in the microwave for about 10 seconds, and the skin comes off easily, almost sliding itself off with little effort on your part.
  4. Boiling water in a pot. Make sure you use cold water and that you cover the pot. A covered pot will heat up faster and keep the heat in, so that your water boils much faster. You can save a significant amount of time just from this one tip.
  5. Cleaning the oil from a frying pan can be a time consuming process. If you try to wash if off with soap and water, you will need a lot of soap and waste a lot of water as well. An easier way is to wipe off all that excess oil from the frying pan using an old newspaper or a paper towel. Once the oil is gone, the frying pan is much easier to clean.

With these tips, you can save a few minutes each day, which you can allocate to other areas of your life. To get a free e-course on time management and how you can achieve more in less time, click here.

Shafir Ahmad is the author of “The Experts Guide to Managing Your Time”. If you are not managing your time, then you are wasting it. Don’t waste time! Get your 7-Part e-course on Secrets To Better Time Management at http://www.PlanYourTimeNow.com


Now, I don’t think the tips are useless, it’s just that a housewife who hopes to save time following tips like these is bound to fail in applying the fundamentals. Given the challenge that the average cook has with the fundamentals of time management, these tips are altogether the wrong thing to focus on.

In an earlier post I talked about the idea of Big Rocks in 2Time – key practices to implement first, before any tips are attempted. They make up the meat and potatoes of time management, while the tips make up the candy to indulge in now and again for some quick calories and a sweet taste on the tongue.

Well, the tips in this article are definitely not Big Rocks, which a user needs to understand so that they continue to focus on their fundamentals, even while they taste the tips now and again.