Non-business resources
Posted in Personal time, Uncategorized by: SandiBusiness discussions aside, I thought I’d share a couple of resources that I use to help manage day-to-day household kind of stuff. These two resources have absolutely nothing to do with business, but they sure do make my two most hated chores - menu planning and grocery shopping - a lot less cumbersome. (I love to cook, just hate the planning & shopping you have to do in order to be able to cook!)
Allrecipes.com is my favorite, and the one I’ve used the longest. Not only can you find great recipes for everything from breakfast to midnight snacks, but they have great time-saving features on the site too! For example, if you find a great recipe you want to try, you can add it to your online recipe box with a simple click. Then it’s easy for you to find later. To make it even better, you can also add the recipe ingredients to your shopping list, also with just a simple click. The shopping list takes all the ingredients from all the recipes you tell it to add, and breaks them down into an isle-by-isle kind of list (at least a department by department list, anyway…bakery items, canned foods items, deli items, etc. You get the idea!)
I love this site, I have to say. It makes menu planning a breeze! I let my kids go online to the site & pick out what they want to have for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, etc. They find something they think sounds yummy, they add it to my recipe box, and move on. When I’m ready to go shopping, I pull up my recipe box, see what the kids added, click the link to add it to my shopping list & off I go. It takes me less than 2 minutes to pull together our menu for the week & get my list ready. (My daughter - the budding chef in our house - prints out the recipes later & puts them on the fridge. When the kids ask ‘what’s for dinner?’ I just point to the fridge and tell them to pick something!)
Recipezaar.com is another site, similar to allrecipes.com that I’ve just recently found. Rather than having your own ‘recipe box,’ you can set up your own unique ‘cookbook’ from the recipes on their site. From there you can create a shopping list, plan a menu, etc. I haven’t completely explored all the features of the site, as I’m still kind of biased towards Allrecipes, but I’m playing around & having fun. I can definitely see it becoming another favorite.
The way I see it, anything I can do to help simplify or automate various aspects of my life, (like the chores I hate) the more time I have for other, more important things…like planning my next get-away with my favorite sexy Italian man (you know who you are, sweetheart!) or spending some much-needed down-time with my family, or working on the next big project for Virtually Yours. If I can save time somewhere, or make something easier, be it business or personal tasks, then hey! I’m all for it! When you wear all the hats (business owner, marketing department, bookkeeping department, personal assistant, mom, girlfriend, chauffer, referee, handyman, counselor, coach, writer, advocate, ad hoc teenage psychologist, chef, maid, butler, linguist (who hasn’t felt they needed a translator when talking with their teenagers!), and all around ‘hold that’ girl) anything you can do to make things work better, stronger, faster, or more efficient is a huge plus in your own favor. 
Have a great resource to share with other business owners? Feel free to post it here in the comments section, or shoot me an email at sandi@virtuallyyoursllc.com & I’ll post it for you!
