Leveraging Meal Delivery Services for Efficient Time Management in Remote Work

There are a lot of perks to working remotely, and you might assume that when your office is steps away from your kitchen, you’ll have more time to pick and choose the healthier foods you’ve been promising yourself you’ll switch to all these years.

However, the unfortunate reality is that remote work blurs the lines between personal and professional life, frequently leading to longer hours and a more fragmented schedule. So those benefits you expected in terms of your diet and free time can fall by the wayside with worrying swiftness. Soon, you could come to dread the thought of taking time away from your desk in the middle of the working day to put together lunch, or find yourself too drained in the evenings to do anything other than order takeout.

The answer to this modern conundrum comes in the form of meal delivery services, which can help with reclaiming those lost minutes while also keeping your health and fitness goals on track. So if you’ve only just heard about this as an option, or you’re on the fence, stick around as we break down the time-efficient, no-compromises nature of fresh, fully prepared food delivered to your door.

Prepared Meals as a Catalyst for Productivity

Remote workers know that while cooking can be a delightful break, more often than not it’s a time-consuming distraction. Between slicing, dicing, and dishwashing, your day can slip through your fingers. Here’s how prepared meal delivery plans can unshackled you from the chopping board, and help you achieve your professional goals:

• Streamlined Daily Routines: With someone else stirring the pot prior to the food being delivered, professionals can transform time spent on meal prep into productive work sessions or much-needed downtime.
• Nutrition on Autopilot: No more half-hearted grocery runs or impulsive and expensive restaurant visits. These services curate balanced menus designed by dieticians, ensuring you're well-fueled to tackle tasks at hand.
• Culinary Consistency: Predictability isn't bland—it's powerful. Knowing when and what you'll eat removes the daily guesswork and assists in structuring a consistent workday.

A recent set of stats from the BLS was particularly revealing in terms of showing how much of the day can be dedicated to dealing with food and drink duties; it was second only to watching TV in terms of the proportion of the population that participates daily, sitting above socializing and communicating.

For people who love to cook, it can of course be cathartic – but for the rest of us, taking up an average of 53 minutes of each 24 hour period for prepping meals is an energy-sapping chore. And over a lifetime, that’s literally years given over to something you simply don’t enjoy.

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Nutrition as Fuel for Focus at Work

What we eat is inextricably linked to how well we perform. Our brain, much like any sophisticated machine, requires quality fuel for peak operational prowess to be achieved. And in a remote work context, mealtimes can suffer because they become an afterthought rather than the main event.

So, if we want our brains to be switched on so that we can make the most of the time we do have available to dedicate to working from home, then meal delivery services have a lot to offer, including:

• Elevated Energy Levels: Regular, nutritious meals will mean that you aren’t at the mercy of the peaks and valleys of energy availability. Balanced macros from prepared meal delivery plans translate into sustained mental sharpness and stamina. And since studies show that people of a healthy weight use more energy during the hours they are awake, while obesity is associated with increased overnight energy use, there’s yet another good reason to formalize your food intake schedule with the help of specialized delivery services.
• Mood Modulation: Mood swings are just as much of a malignant force in remote work scenarios as energy level issues. Once again, consistent intake of wholesome foods has been associated with a more stable mood—so if you want to stay focused and motivated, make nutrition a priority.
• Mental Health Maintenance: Ultra-processed foods make up a worrying proportion of modern diets, and we’re discovering that this is not just bad for our bodies, but bad for our minds. Harvard Medical School points out that researchers have linked lower levels of depression with eating more traditional, historic diets – with risks of mental health issues falling by as much as 35% in those who stick to nutritional regimens inspired by Mediterranean cuisine, for instance.
• Cognitive Clarity: A diet rich in omega-3s, antioxidants, and vitamins enhances memory and concentration. The carefully chosen ingredients found in many prepared meal delivery plans are good for your waistline and a boon for the brain in one neat package.

It’s also worth touching on the fact that our decision-making suffers when we’re hungry – with a University of Gothenburg study from 2016 revealing that it all comes down to appetite-increasing hormones which increase impulsivity and hamper our ability to choose wisely. 

This obviously has ramifications on our food choices, but more significantly in a remote work context means that you might pick the wrong path when faced with a tough decision that needs immediate action when you’re feeling peckish.

Exploring the Efficiency Equation

The walk to the kitchen is short, but the journey through meal prep can be long and tiresome, as we’ve established. Even the most competent of chefs can experience kitchen burnout, and if this is a barrier to your best work, then it needs to be nipped in the bud. Let’s talk over the reasons that meal services can make this happen:

• Time Reclaimed: Bypassing the prep and cleanup process with a meal delivery service redirects focus where it belongs, which is of course on key projects from day to day, and on your personal and professional growth over the course of weeks and months.
• Decision Fatigue Diminished: With fewer meals to plan, you conserve mental energy for decisions that drive results, not just dinner. This comes back to the earlier point we made about choice – while it’s a good thing in small doses, too much of it leaves us feeling overwhelmed. Moreover, we tend to make decisions less efficiently, and make ‘safer’ choices, the later in the day it gets, according to Psychology Today. This means that whatever you can to trim down the thousands of decisions that you face when working remotely, the benefits will be significant.
• Space for Spontaneity: When mealtimes are managed, there’s more room for creativity. A clear schedule opens up space for brainstorming sessions or impromptu calls – and so it’s got knock-on advantages to the rest of your team, in addition to bolstering your own abilities.

Everyone has the same 24 hours to make use of in a day, and good time management is not about cramming in as much as possible, because this can have the opposite effect to the one intended. Meal delivery services are more about streamlining rather than over-stuffing, so they give you the space to be productive without feeling like both ends of the candle are being melted away at an alarming rate.

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Synergizing Work Duties with Life Goals

Up top we pointed out that where remote working is concerned, it’s all too common for your personal life to take a back seat. Just because the commute is eliminated, that doesn’t mean you should end up siphoning off spare time to satisfy the insatiable demands of your job. And with meal delivery services factored into this equation, you’ve got the ideal delineation between your office hours and your outside-of-work freedom, even if your home is also your office. Here’s how you can achieve this:

• Transition Time: Designate mealtime as a natural pause—a bridge from focused work to mindful relaxation, courtesy of meals arriving ready-to-eat.
• Nutritional Wellbeing: When you’re eating healthily, you not only have more energy and focus for working, but also the same attributes to apply to leisure activities, meaning life in general is more enjoyable and fulfilling. Still having energy to see friends, spend time with family or pursue your hobbies after working all day will feel like an amazing improvement.
• Evening Unwind: With dinner sorted, you can transition smoothly into any unwinding rituals that you have put in place as part of your decision to work remotely. It’s less about doing dishes and more about enjoying dusk – whether that’s with a glass of wine and a good book, a board game with the kids before bed, or a session of multiplayer gaming with your online amigos.

Interestingly enough, data from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that those who frequently cook at home consume fewer calories on average than those who cook less—even when eating out. Yet the time savings afforded to remote workers by meal delivery services infuses this health benefit with added value in the form of hours per week freed up for living life in more meaningful ways than the daily grind.

It’s worth restating that the meal delivery services we’re focusing on here are the ones which are fresh, not frozen – and which are intricately designed to mimic the benefits of home-cooked victuals, rather than being over-processed and over-seasoned. There’s no point saving time if you’re also sacrificing your health, so keep this in mind when choosing a provider.

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Harnessing Habits to Transform Time Management

It’s no secret that having a routine is useful for anyone who struggles with time management and wants to stay on top of the ticking clock, rather than always playing catch-up. Forming good habits that we stick to day by day is part of this, and using prepared meals as a way of creating this structure on which everything else can hang is wise. Here’s why:

• Freeing Up Headspace: We’ve already touched on how taking mundane choices over what to eat off the table is good for your decision-making in other areas, and that’s a definite perk in a habit-forming context. You can also apply this approach to other aspects of your routine – such as what you wear when working remotely. Having a simple wardrobe, rather than one that’s overflowing with options, saves you time and mental bandwidth as well. It’s all part of a holistic approach to mental wellbeing; one that nevertheless needs a proactive hand on the tiller.
• Creating Predictable Pleasure: The anticipation of a satisfying meal can be a motivator, giving you the encouragement it takes to power through challenging afternoons – think of it as the carrot rather than the stick, often in quite literal terms.
• Sustainable Choices: Many meal services aim for sustainability in sourcing ingredients—so you can align your dinner plate with your values for an extra serving of satisfaction.

Over the course of the pandemic and the associated lockdowns, wellness advice from the World Health Organization and other authorities was to use routines as a means of propping up mental health in a world turned upside down. While this may no longer seem necessary as the acute issues the advice addressed have dissipated, the reality is that remote work can leave employees feeling stir crazy and lacking in control. Consistent, positive habits that go together to make up a routine are the answer here, and combining pre-prepared meals as part of a time management strategy will leave you with soaring productivity levels and a more stable mental state.

Conclusion

A lot of talk surrounding time management for professionals revolves around the use of specific software tools, as well as wider organizational changes. But when we’re talking specifically about working remotely, it’s much more useful to focus on things individuals can do to make a difference to their schedules, and avoid the oft-discussed burnout that can come when operating outside of the office.

Meal delivery services stand out as a superb example of what’s available to employees who work from home and want to take the reins of the time that’s available to them. And of course as well as shoring up schedules, they stand to provide health benefits that apply both for work productivity and personal life fulfillment. So if you haven’t looked into this option, now’s the time to do so!

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