Since meal planning can be an excellent way to save money and keep your family from eating out, it’s important to be organized.
However, sitting down at the kitchen table with all your cookbooks, recipe binders, and printed out recipes can make meal planning stressful!
In addition to trying to flip through all these papers and books, where are you supposed to put them all in the meantime?!
It’s time to digitally arrange those recipes and get organized so you can meal plan efficiently!
I’ve been meal planning for my family for years now, and until recently I never even considered paperless meal planning!
But can you organize recipes and stay that way so can meal plan in less time? Now that’s the challenge!
Paperless meal planning has made meal planning easier than ever! And organizing recipes has gotten even easier the past few years.
You can organize recipes digitally so that it will save you time trying to find a recipe that you can use for hamburger or chicken.
Also, you can organize recipe ideas by type like crockpot or Instapot that will save you tons of time trying to decide what to make on sports nights.
And, you can organize recipes online so that you can make dinner fast.
Here is how you can meal plan paperless!
How To Organize Recipes On Pinterest
For those of you who are short on storage space, or like the flexibility of meal planning on the go, this is an excellent option to organize recipe ideas!
Pinterest is a gold mine for recipes of all different types. It’s a great way to organize recipes digitally!
How to organize recipes is to start by creating boards for your recipes. If you don’t want everyone else to see them, you mark them as secret so only you can see them.
You can arrange recipe ideas by mealtime, cook time, the main ingredient, crockpot, or however you’d like.
BONUS DOWNLOAD
Want to plan your weekly meals with less hassle?
Download these FREE Meal Plan Templates and you'll get your meals and shopping list organized in just minutes.
Using Pinterest to arrange recipes is by far my favorite way to stay organized when meal planning.
Plus, there are always new recipes to find for inspiration! We hate getting stuck in a dinner rut!
Save Your Recipes Using Evernote
One of the downsides to Pinterest is that at any time a blogger can take down their website and your recipe might be gone forever! Oh, no is right!
Evernote is a great way on how to organize recipes all in one program without needing to worry about them ever again!
How to organize meal planning recipes with Evernote is so simple that I use it all the time.
You will need to install a web clipper application to keep your recipes, or you will have to type them in manually.
Once you’re in Evernote, you can create notebooks for each category you would like to save them under.
When you find a new recipe, all you do is store them inside one of the notebooks! Once you store recipes digitally, you’ll never go back to printed paper recipes!
It is as easy as that! You can even save your meal plans here for future use.
Use An App On Your Phone To Meal Plan
Whether you have an Apple or Android device, you can still download one of the many meal planning apps to do your meal planning and to organize recipe ideas.
How to find new recipes can be made easier by apps which can also help you to create a grocery list for you.
Not only is this a great way to organize recipes online but you’ll have it handy on your phone when you go shopping!
Here are some of my favorite must-have meal planning apps (the best part, all of them are free):
Organizing recipes is better than ever with phone apps! Easy and convenient!
Use Google Calendar To Manage Your Meal Plan
How to organize recipes is to use start using Google calendar! Sign in to your Google account and click on the Calendar option of the homepage.
You can click on month or week at a glance to see everything you have planned for the week right there on your calendar!
In addition to your primary calendar, you can also have a sub-calendar which works perfectly for meal planning!
If you want to see them together, you can click them as well!
BONUS DOWNLOAD
Want to plan your weekly meals with less hassle?
Download these FREE Meal Plan Templates and you'll get your meals and shopping list organized in just minutes.
You will need a separate place to store your recipes, but you can use Drive or another program for this.
Use Google Drive To Hold All Of Your Meal Plans And Recipes
If you don’t have many recipes to store, you can use Google Drive to save and organize recipes online.
You can store up to 15 GB for free per Gmail account to arrange recipe ideas, so you can use more than one account if needed.
How to organize recipes is to upload all your recipes by either scanning them, or saving them as a PDF, and add them to a folder of your choice.
When you are ready to meal plan, you can type your recipes into the search bar to find something specific or look through the folders.
To arrange recipes digitally means you can start planning in seconds!
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to have a dozen cookbooks, printable worksheets, and recipes printed out to put together a great meal plan.
When you organize recipes online, you’ll be saving yourself time and clutter.
Finding new recipes can even be as simple as using an app!
With so many resources at your disposal, save your printer ink for couponing or something else!
You can organize recipes digitally so that it will save you time trying to find a recipe that you can use for hamburger or chicken.
Also, you can organize recipe ideas by type like crockpot or Instapot that will save you tons of time trying to decide what to make on sports nights.
And, you can organize recipes online so that you can make dinner fast. So as you can see, meal planning paper-free can be so easy!