Teacher Skills: Min/Max For Optimisation Starting With Food

Maximise Results & Minimise Wastage

Last week I talked about the importance of automation and automating as many teacher related processes as possible. I provided a bit of a clunky framework which looked a little something like this: [(Creating Tools + Strategies) / (Incremental Adjustment)] - Total Time Spent = Automation

Or

(Creating Tools + Strategies) 

_______________________

(Incremental Adjustment)] - Total Time Spent

 = Automation

This week, let’s focus on the “denominator” part of the equation, using “food prep” to explore the importance of min/maxing. Here, we aim to minimize time spent on tasks while maximizing output—especially in ways that benefit you and your students.

Min/Maxing: Optimising Your Process

Time is the top resource most teachers seek to optimize. Ideally, it’s time for yourself, or for your social life—but most of the time, it’s to manage the ever-growing list of tasks.

But there are many other things to optimize as well. Today, let’s focus on min/maxing your approach to food.

Also known as meal prep… 

Or the lack thereof…

Why Meal Prep Matters for Teachers

Meal prep takes time. It takes planning. It costs money. And it requires effort.

Oftentimes, new teachers, or even teachers in the early or mid stages of their career don’t have a lot of time or money. The tricky bit is, developing the skills and discipline needed to identify what a good trade off looks like for both. 

From the perspective of my wallet and of my stomach I have had the great pleasure and misfortune of working at two different schools that were located in the downtown cores of New Westminster, and Vancouver. In both cases I fell into the bad habit of maximising the amount I was paying and minimising the amount of money I was able to take home.

And I even fell into the habit of telling myself  if I only ate half of what I bought I would have food leftover for the next day. Which actually ended up being the case… Sometimes…

But, at the end of the day, I couldn’t justify the amount of money I was paying when measured against my need to pay rent, my desire to save money, and the deterioration of my ability to go up a single flight of stairs without becoming severely winded.

That was just one of many times I realized I wasn’t optimizing for long-term health and happiness as a teacher.

Optimizing My Process

Say this out loud: “If I want to save time, money, and hassle, I need to understand the power of slow cookers, rice cookers, and knife skills…”

Add “produce delivery services” to this mantra too. For me, though, the emphasis is on the plural: skills and cookers.

A teacher with only one slow cooker has time for only one meal. A teacher with two slow cookers (and some basic sauce-making) has time for many!

The awesome thing about slow cookers, and rice cookers for that matter, is that they tend to be both cheap and plentiful on the shelves of your local second hand store. (Just be sure to double check that they work before you leave with them…)

My goal is to maximize “tasty” food production while minimizing time spent actively cooking.

For me, everything takes six hours to cook at a temperature of ‘high’ on my slow cooker. My rice cookers only come online in the last two hours of those six and can produce anything from rice or pasta, to soups, or additional sauces.

An additional quirk of my processes is that everything which goes into my slow cookers, that is not a garnish, spice or a liquid, goes in in cubed form.

The cooked meals go over rice or pasta and into 16 oz. (473 ml) stackable containers, then into the freezer in stacks of four. I rotate these with meals from previous weeks.

Meal Prep as Part of Your Teacher Automation Strategy

 Last week, I mentioned Ramit Sethi’s advice to focus on $30,000 questions over $3 ones when building a rich life.

After years of min/maxing my meal prep, I realized prepping vs. buying fast food was nearly a $300 question—and a health question too.

That $300 difference was the cost of prepping my meals vs. eating fast food three to four times a week (sometimes twice a day).

For me, the savings, and the skills I developed while trying to make meal prep a part of my teaching lifestyle automation process are worth it. 

I feel better. I have more money in the bank. And oddly, I ended up with a knowledge base that gave rise to an unofficial slow/rice cooker club at my school.

It turns out, many international students find themselves in need of adopting some min/max strategies when it comes to saving money while still having access to nutritious food. 

Now save for one awkward semester early on in my career, I have never been a Home Economics or Foods Teacher. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that I felt more than a little proud of having students swapping pictures and recipes with one another about what they were going to be meal prepping on the weekend. 

What Teacher Tasks Are You Working Towards Min/Maxing At The Moment?

Food and meal prep aren’t the only teacher related tasks which can benefit from the application of intentional min/maxing strategies. The big key is to understand what constitutes a good, and incrementally improveable, return on investment. And next week we are going to be taking a look about how you can leverage AI systems like ChatGPT to help you develop just such an optimization strategy when it comes to marking.