How to Manage Your Shopping List
Learn how to manage your shopping list when you don’t know what you need.
Today’s topic is getting groceries without forgetting something. The quick and dirty tip is to use a list that learns.
Omer from Tel Aviv, Israel writes in:
I live with my girlfriend for the past year and we always have the same problem: We can’t make a decent grocery shopping list. Even when I write a list at home it is never comprehensive enough. Sometimes she knows what we need but I am the one actually going… It seems that always there is always something missing in my bag when I come home. We need to find a way to make a list that will be updated all the time and available anywhere..
Grocery shopping!! I just love grocery shopping!! … No, I don’t. I hate grocery shopping. I always go when I’m hungry, and I don’t even bother to take a list. I just get what looks good. Like marinated olives. We have 200 half-eaten tubs of marinated olives in the fridge, and let’s not even get started on the string cheese. The best part about the Internet revolution is that I can grocery shop from home and get everything delivered. Videos, too! I can watch all the Zombie World Domina… Er, no. The Sound of Music. My therapist said Julie Andrews. Do a deer. Just watch the awesome YouTube video of the flash mob choreographed dance, and everything will be safe and calm. Ahhh.
You want a list that learns from experience. Most people shop for basically the same stuff over and over. Maybe you change brands a bit. This week, you buy the 16-pack of Kleenex, whereas next week you buy the 16-pack of Scott tissue. Over time, you’ll be able to figure out that your weekly shopping list should include a 16-pack of some kind of tissue paper. You will also be able to figure out that you should see a nose doctor about that. It’s not normal.
Keep Your Grocery List On Your Computer
Create a document on your computer where you store the master copy of your list. As a first pass, just type in everything you think you’ll need at the store. Make your list a bullet list, and set the bullet to be a hollow circle or square that you can fill in. I use Pages for the Mac, which has an awesome hand-drawn-looking checkbox by each item. You can you use your own favorite word processing program, and create your own bullet list.
Now print out the list and hang it on your refrigerator, or the little bulletin board you have next to the front door. If you don’t have a little bulletin board, get one for goodness’ sake. It’s a great place to leave phone messages for your roommate, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, or polyamorous family unit. You can add spice to your relationship by writing half a message and tearing the paper so it looks like the rest got lost. Make up stuff like, “Family emergency! On my way to visit. Love, XXX” but don’t actually give any details; then don’t answer when people call your cell phone frantically. It’s lots of fun, and your whole family will think it was a hilarious joke when you reveal nothing’s wrong.
Use the Paper List as Your Grocery List
When you find you need something, draw a slash through bullet next to the item you need. If the thing you need isn’t on the list, add it, draw in a little bullet, and put a slash through it. Tell everyone else to do it, too.
This is now your shopping list. Take it with you when you head off to the store. Buy the items with slashes through them. Let’s say you’re walking down an aisle and see a canister of Zombie Reanimation Powder. Oh? Did I say Zombie Reanimation powder? I meant phyllo pastry sheets. For baking. strudel. Like they have in Austria. When you see the phyllo sheets, if they appear on your list with a single slash, you know you need them. Toss them in your cart and do another slash so you have an X next to phyllo on your list.
If you need the dough but there’s no slash on your list, grab a package and “X out” the bullet. Then when you get home, find whoever used the last package and make their life a living hell for not having marked it off on the sheet. Life is too short not to torture your loved ones into making your life more convenient. Finally, if you need it, but it’s not even on your list, write it in by hand.
Make Your List Learn
Remember how I said this list will learn? When you get home type in all the handwritten items you had to buy that weren’t on the list to start with. Then print out the new, fresh list, and put it on your bulletin board. The whole process starts again.
The key to making this work is that your list gradually becomes a list of pretty much everything you ever might need. Then it becomes everyone’s responsibility to notice when you actually do need something. If one of your loved ones hassles you for forgetting an item, you can thrust the responsibility right back at them. Smile sweetly and say, “You didn’t add it to the list.” Then make them go out and get it, immediately. Soon, people will learn it’s much easier to keep the bulletin board list up-to-date than to be running out for Reanimation Powder every time … I mean, phyllo dough every time you need to make a strudel.
For extra credit, you can group items on your list by their supermarket aisle. If you’re as pathetic as me, you can even put the aisles in the same order on your sheet as they are in the store. So when you head out to shop, you just zip through the items grabbing what you need.
And that, my friend, makes shopping a joy. Well, not a joy. But less of a soul-rending agony of remembering your list, and navigating your cart, and time, and space, and multidimensional teleportation. Good luck. And pick up a package of strudel for me next time you’re at the store…
Oh, and be sure to check out my tip on keeping your food organized.
This is Stever Robbins. See this episode’s transcript with a link to the flashmob dance number at getitdone quickanddirtytips
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
RESOURCES:
Unpacking Groceries image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
