The Lazy Genius Podcast - #276 - How to Pack Lunch for Work

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

I’m excited about this episode because when I went looking for grownup lunch help, I found very little that would work for a variety of people. Most solutions start from the wrong place, so today we’re going to Lazy Genius this. We’re going to go in the right order, which is a Lazy Genius principle, and we’re going to figure out how to pack lunch for work in a way that supports each person individually and what matters to them.   Helpful Companion Links Episode #238: How to Get Stuff Done When You Don’t Feel Like It The Lazy Genius Kitchen The Chickpea Bowl Download a transcript of this episode.   This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Amazon presents Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Hey there, you are listening to the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 276, How to Pack Lunch for Work. This could be any work, honestly, work somewhere else, work at home, work that's tending to your kids. It's basically lunch for adults. How do adults eat lunch? How does what do this? I'm excited about this episode because when I went looking for

grown-up lunch help on the internet. I found very little that would work for most people. In fact, every resource was either a list of recipes to make, which is fine, it's fine, or a list of tools and things to buy to help people pack and make their lunch, which is also fine. But maybe not the problem. Maybe the lack of recipes and tools aren't actually your problem. I also didn't love that most recipe rundowns involved words about healthy lunches. I have a thing about the word health because it makes us think that unless you're eating a salad you're not being a responsible human which isn't true and it determines what health is for a variety of people and you know it's fine so that was like mildly triggering and very annoying and then the other thing was language

around your work lunch lunch lunch being impressive impress your co-workers with these 20 lunch ideas what on earth you guys is that what the internet thinks we care about when it comes to our food Now maybe there is some truth to where you like personally want to be excited and moved by the food you eat at least some days. You can want it to be pretty and vibrant and varied. That's real. Now maybe the expectation of that isn't every day, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to be excited about your food. We eat with all our senses and we should enjoy that. But for the love, are we really trying to impress our coworkers here? I just got really discouraged digging around the internet looking for work, lunch help.

I found none, like literally zero. I was just, it was no fun. Most solutions started from the wrong place. So today we're going to lazy genius this. We're going to go on the right order, which is a lazy genius principle, and we're going to figure out how to pack lunch for work in a way that supports each person individually and what matters to them. Now, how are we going to do that?

We are going to do that with our five lazy genius steps. Prioritize, essentialize, organize, personalized, and systemize. All of these are laid out in detail and applied to many things in the kitchen. In my book, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, available where all books are sold. Okay, let's do this. So first, we prioritize. We name what matters most about packing lunch for work or just packing lunch. One very important component to this is that your priorities will likely change from season to season, maybe even from week to week.

But we don't leave room for those changes, do we? We do not prioritize in smaller increments. When we have a big challenge that's going on, like packing lunch for work, we think we need a solution that will work until the end of time. We're just trying to solve a problem that's too big over too long of a time. time frame. We need to make the time frame smaller. Forever is too big. We need it to be smaller than forever or until like retirement. Now, because you likely need to pack lunch for work, four or five, maybe even more, days a week, it's probably not helpful to prioritize every single day. I'm not sure it's like a wise use of your time. Every single day when you're about to pack lunch to ask what

matters today about lunch, it could be, but probably not. Chances are good that what matters about packing lunch for work this Monday will still matter this Friday. So it's definitely easier to prioritize in smaller timeframes than forever, but you probably don't want to set a priority for something as small as today. You might, but it's likely a week or two weeks or a month at a time will offer a better structure for you. So that is the first step. Prioritize. What matters most about packing lunch for work this week? Maybe a week is our baseline, right? Now, if you're new to this lazy genius space or you'd tend to have trouble naming what matters, here is our basic approach to narrowing it down. It's a very simple process of elimination. First, name what could matter.

That gets all the possibilities in front of you, just like list them out on a piece of paper if you want to. Second, look at that list and from it, name what does matter. What stands out for you specifically based on your season of life and your most obvious pain points right now this week, right? And then from there, from that smaller group of like maybe three or four things of what does matter, third, I want you to name what matters most. It's not that everything that does matter can no longer matter. It's just that having a singular focus, like a singular priority, it helps you make better decisions for yourself.

The other things will likely still come into play, but that main thing is the driver. Let's say that what does matter to you is food that you're excited to eat, food that takes no more than an hour to batch once a week, and food that doesn't require a microwave to reheat it. because where you work doesn't have a microwave. Now, to me, the most important thing here is the microwave part. You literally cannot reheat your food at work. So that singular priority, it helps narrow down your recipe search. And you're going to stick with cold and room temperature things. That singular priority limits the containers you choose for your lunches, right?

You don't need those glass containers with the vent spout and the lid because you're not reheating anything. instead you could do like a bento box or a stainless steel planet box because you don't put those in the microwave and then as you search for you know just a handful of recipes to use for work lunches if you come across something that is exciting to eat right which is which matters and that doesn't take very long to batch which also matters but it has to be reheated in order to be enjoyed you save it for dinner not for lunch so it's not that you're not going to look for recipes that are excited to eat or easy to batch, but you only look for lunches that don't require a microwave first. It narrows your search, like your literal Google search. You could search, you know, salads that don't

get soggy since you know you're going to eat salads. Or to think about the prep, you could search for ingredient salads or sandwiches you can make in advance. You see what I'm saying? You're not going to Google work lunches. No, no, no, no, no, no. That puts you in a worse place than you were before. So prioritize. Name what matters most to you about packing lunch for work and that thing will help guide your next steps. Okay, so step one is prioritize. Step two, essentialize, which is to get rid of what is in the way. It's also the step where you make sure you have what you need. So what is in the way of you packing lunch for work? is it expectations, motivation, time, feeling like you always have to have something green, or that you can't eat the same thing every day because that's weird.

It's not weird. There could be a lot of things. So name one. Name something that feels like it's in the way. Now my guess is time is a challenge for a lot of you. I just don't have time. And I get that. I get that.

But as you essentialize and get rid of what's in the way, I want you to consider making the thing that feels like it's. it's in the way smaller, right? We always want to do it. Make it smaller. Make the barrier smaller, especially if you say time. So if you do say time is in the way, you just don't have enough. Make it smaller and get more specific about why. Is it that you don't have the time every single morning? So, you know, maybe batching lunches on the weekend makes sense. That's an obvious answer. But as you break that down, your time barrier, maybe you say you don't have time for, for batching either. There are too many things during the weekend that get in the way of prepping any

kind of work lunch. That's cool. I get that too. You're the only one who can see your life and know what the real tangible time barrier might be. Now, I do want to say this though. I want you to please say hello to Kendra, your kind of big sister who has a word for you. There are things that we don't want to do. Probably many, right? We don't want to pay the bills. We don't want to do laundry. We don't want to renew a driver's license or go to the doctor or make work lunches. I am for, years old, and I still sometimes feel like a teenager who's being forced to do chores. I think that's a very real thing. We even have a podcast episode about it called, it's something like how to do stuff when you don't want to. I don't think that's the actual title, but it's like close enough.

But I also think that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes when we say we don't have time, what we're really saying is we don't want to do that thing. We just don't want to. We don't want to spend our limited time on something that isn't enjoyable. We have enough of those kinds of tasks already, right? And I think that packing lunch for work is one of those grown-up responsibilities that gets pushed to the back of the line when our motivation is basically non-existent. We need clean clothes, so we'll do laundry. We groan, but we do it. We need to keep our electricity on and avoid credit card late fees, so we'll pay our bills. We grown. And we might even make it a little bit easier by automating as many bills as possible, but we do it. There are certain things

that we don't want to do, that if we don't do them, there are some pretty dire consequences, right? But I don't think lunch feels as important as those things that might have dire consequences. Or actually more accurately, maybe it's that we want lunch to be fulfilling. We do want it to matter. we do want it to count. We do think that there are consequences actually to having to not having a lunch that we really love. We want to eat yummy food in the middle of the day. We want to stop our work and open a container and be like generally excited about what we see and smell and taste. But making lunch for work barely gets our energy leftovers, let alone our actual energy. And it needs some energy. Making food requires a little bit of energy. But we don't use enough to get us to. We're

a place where lunch is fulfilling. We think we're the problem and that everybody else has this all figured out, you know, but they don't in the way that you think they do. People who pack lunch for work and have foods like ready to go are just people who prioritize doing it even when they don't want to. They just make the food and pack it, whether all at once or each day or every couple of days or whatever. Or they're food bloggers who are making content and showing you stacks of packed glass containers.

But if they weren't making food content, they might not actually do that. We have to keep that in mind. That's a real thing. Making lunch takes effort, even just a little bit. And it's important to see other people's effort for what it is. It's either internet content or someone's priority, even if they don't really want to do it. It is the unicorn person who just loves making and packing lunch every week. So in this second step of essentializing, I want you to be honest about what's in the

way. It could be that you just don't want to make another meal. And so you don't. But then what happens is you get mad that you don't have a lunch that's fulfilling or nourishing or pretty or tasty or whatever. It's incongruent. We have to put a little time into these things. Unless you want to buy your lunch every day, which you totally can. Oh my goodness. You have to put a little time into packing lunch for work. And if you don't, if you don't put time into it, then you just can't expect a beautifully packed lunch. That's the incongruency. Okay. Now, if your priority is that you want to cook as little as possible for lunch, right? You could eat cheese and crackers and like ham and an apple every day, you know? Like you can choose to eat lunches that are not cooked. They're just foods that exist

and are available to you when you are hungry. That is great. No one says you cannot do that. So if not cooking is your priority, you should do that. Not should, but that's an idea. I don't like to use the word should. But if you want more composed meals, you cannot get a lunch that has multiple components, whether they're chopped or cooked or thought through in some way without a little bit of time and effort. We can minimize as much effort in time as possible. But if there's anything beyond opening a package of something and just eating it, you'll have to spend a little bit of time.

I know that's so simplistic and obvious, and I hope you don't feel like I'm yelling at you, but it's just something that we forget. We want open a bag of crackers ease, but with a beautiful stir-fry lunch or something. And that's just not reality. It's not anyone's reality unless they have someone cooking for them. So essentialize and get rid of the expectation that that is a reality, because it's not. we have to spend a little time and it very well could be worth it to you and feel like the effort is a good use of your time once you reframe it that way. So prioritize, essentialize, and then organize.

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I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, the first two steps can help you see the time that you need, you know, the specific recipes that you need, the tools you need, that kind of thing. And now you're going to organize those things. You organize your time to pack lunch for work. You choose where in the week you're going to spend, you know, half an hour getting lunches together. You organize your recipes by choosing five and deciding how you might rotate them. You organize your realistic thoughts by putting the truth in its place,

like in the forefront of your mind. Maybe you have a sticky note on your fridge that says, let's love lunch this week. I don't know. You can organize your people by having everyone pitch in to make family lunches. You can organize your coworkers if this is doable for you, or like two or three or four of you, each make one big lunch that feeds everybody one day a week. I realize that is a very unique situation, and you kind of want to make sure that those people sort of know how to cook.

But there are a lot of things that you can put in their places to make packing lunch for work a little bit easier. You just have to think about that now after you prioritize and essentialize. So that's step three. Now step four is a pretty important one here, and we're going to spend a little more time on it and that's personalized. You want to feel like yourself. You want the enjoyment of lunch to exist in a way that matters to you.

We want the food to work for you, okay? Right? I want the process of making the food to work for you and I want the food to work for you. I want it to make you happy. And all within your own skill set and preferences and schedule. It's okay to say, I don't want salads ever. That is your own personal decision. And you can make it.

If you don't feel like yourself during and or after you eat a salad, and that is real, by the way, it just doesn't do it for you, you know? It doesn't fill you up. It doesn't make you smile. Don't eat salad. There are other things to eat that aren't salad, or at least the kind of salad you're thinking about. So personalize this.

Feel like yourself. In my book, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, which I already mentioned, I share the 7 Peas to personalizing your stuff because I have an English degree and I love alliteration. I will not go into them here, but there are a lot of components that might impact you feeling like yourself in any situation, including packing lunch for work. And they're important to listen to. Be true to who you are and what you need in this season of life that you're in, in the season of the job that you're in.

Like you might be in the middle of a project where it's important to actually take time to eat lunch and take a break and enjoy it, right? You don't need to force yourself until like a lunch box. Oh my goodness. I did not even mean to make that pun. It's amazing. Okay. Now before we get to step five, a quick side note.

And I say this in the lazy genius kitchen. But there are certain problems that when you're trying to lazy genius them, one of the five steps will just like sparkle and others are like less necessary. You can kind of gloss over the last. them. Some things don't need to be systemized as much. Some things don't need to be personalized as much. It's not that every step holds equal weight of those five steps. You want to consider them all in their order that is important, but don't feel like you're doing it wrong if you spend way less time on one than another. So in the case of lunches, I think that organizing your work lunches is less important

than personalizing or this final step in particular, which is to systemize. Systemize is the sparkly one here. You want things to be in a flow. Packing lunch for work is not a static thing, right? It's not a put everything in its place and now you're done thing. Certain things are like that, but packing lunches really does need a system or a flow. And the way you create that flow is by using lazy genius principles. You can decide once. You can decide that four recipes will be your lunches for the next month or two or however long before those recipes don't work anymore. You can decide once that you'll make the week's lunches on Sunday night or you're going to get up an hour earlier and do it Monday morning. You can decide once that Monday lunch is always takeout and that whatever you make for Monday's dinner either is or includes like similar prep to something that you can make for the four lunches for the rest of the week.

So you're doing all the lunch prep during Monday's dinner prep. You can decide once that you will always take leftovers for lunch. if there aren't any, you'll take a turkey sandwich and an apple. You can decide anything once. That's a great principle to keep things in a rhythm. You can also batch it. That's another lazy genius principle that we already know about when it comes to work lunches for sure. Make a week's worth at once, you know? We for sure know that, but you can also adjust the edges of that idea to work for you. Maybe it's not that you pack all your work lunches to completion on a Sunday night. That's, I think, what we imagine. Instead, maybe it's that you cook some chicken over the weekend or once a month

and you cut it into strips and you freeze those strips and then you can more spontaneously every day or two know that you can pack a lunch that involves those grilled chicken strips, right? You can make a chicken cassidia that you can microwave. You can do a chicken salad with whatever vegetables you have around. You can do a grain bowl and just throw the chicken on that. You can put the chicken in a wrap. you're batching the protein, not the whole meal. Does that make sense? So when you think about batching, open your mind, open your mind to different elements of batching, not just the full lunch like A to Z in a glass container stacked in your fridge. You can totally batch that way. It's just not the only way. You can systemize your lunches by creating a meal matrix where certain types of

lunches exist on certain days of the week, or it's that you eat one thing for an entire week and then you rotate. So like week one, you eat chickpea bowl every day. The week after that, you eat Tim Rigan salad every day. The week after that, you eat chicken ticam masala every day. And then the final week at the month, you eat grilled cheese and tomato soup every day. See what I'm saying? And then you just like start over. So the organization and the systemization of your lunches, it can vary depending on your needs. In fact, they should vary depending on your needs. Honestly, y'all, I really think the biggest barrier for us when it comes to packing lunch

for work is that our expectations don't match the energy we're willing to give. We want colorful, thoughtful lunches on peanut butter and jelly time. And that just doesn't work. So if you only want to give peanut butter and jelly time, have peanut butter and jelly for lunch. Eat cheese and crackers and be cool with it, you know? match your expectations to the energy you're willing to give. And whatever you choose is a good choice. There's no bad call here.

You get to eat the kind of lunch you want to based on the energy that you want to give. Now there might be a season soon where you have more motivation or interest in dedicating, you know, 45 minutes at once to making something for the week. But if that's not right now, you can kindly accept that this is a season for cheese and crackers and that's okay. And if you eat cheese and crackers and it no longer works for you, perhaps that need will give you that tiny extra dose of motivation to make a different lunch choice that meets your new needs. Does that make sense? Match your expectations to the energy you're willing to give. That's probably the most important element to packing lunch for work.

We'll talk about some recipes and like maybe specific tips on Instagram this week because y'all are really, really smart. But for now, let me just remind you that the chickpea bowl on my website, is one of my favorite lunch recipes that meets a lot of needs. It's gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegan. It's delicious. It's super easy. Comes together really fast. It's easy to make a big batch of. It keeps really well for the entire week. It doesn't get old. It actually is like decent, cold. And it works for all seasons. It doesn't even require chopping unless you want to. It is definitely worth a try. And is my singular recipe recommendation for today.

So go through the five lazy genius steps, match your expectations to the energy you're willing to give, and try the chick people. And that's how to pack lunch for work. Amen. All right, before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. Today, it's Jen Dengora, who has the best idea if you have kids at home. I've already implemented it. Here is what Jen emailed me. Hi, Kendra. A small container sits on the top of my piano. Depending on the season or holiday, the container may change, but its purpose is a house rule. It is primarily a decide once, but basically all the principles at the same exact time. It is where the little toys go that belong to something bigger, that belong in a different room, or you don't want to get lost under said piano. Lego heads, micro machines, that piece to that thing that fell off today, all the bouncy balls and rocks that fall out of pockets. It holds all those little things so that when anyone finds one

or is looking for one you go to the container on the piano. But I feel like returning the contents to their place I can, but I also don't have to, like ever, because for this season of life, the container stays on the piano for all to access. Thank you, Kendra, for blessing us with access to the lazy genius principles so I can stop hating my kids' tiny toy pieces and instead enjoy the things that matter more to me, Jen.

Jen, this is magical. You know why I like this? Obviously, the practicality of it is great because there are always so many little things that belong to something else. But I love the heart behind this. It's so honoring. A lot of times when I find little tiny things, I'm annoyed by them first. And then I will often put them in a giant basket with all the catch-all living room toys,

that then the little things are never found again because they're just at the bottom of the giant basket. Or straight up, I'll just throw it away, which is not great. It is not kind. That's putting what matters to me way before what might matter to my kids. So this jar is so honoring. It's like the tiny things jar. It's holding a place for those little things that show up in the season of life because they just do. And it's not the kid's fault, right?

It's just the nature of tiny toys and tiny humans. So this is so practical and beautiful and so lazy genius, Jen. Thank you for sharing it with us and for being the lazy genius of the week. That is it for today. I hope you all enjoyed this episode. And if you did, it'd be amazing if you shared it with somebody. This podcast has slowly grown over the five years we've been doing it. And that's because of those small, organic, seemingly insignificant shares that seem insignificant to you, but they really do matter.

So if this helped you and you think it might help someone else, it would mean a lot if you'd share. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra. I'll see you next week. You ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that.

More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life? because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves.

Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.