Project as meal planning

How does my brain end up where it ends up? I remember in the morning thinking about how my mother used to make weekly meal plans because she had to drive to the next town with two kids in tow to shop for groceries. She had a dedicated notebook and planned out each week’s meals with pencil and paper, and we’re talking square meals with all the food groups and a huge variety of cuisines.

I was already thinking about making a meal planner, but instead I decided to start with a life-coaching prompt that would help me focus on some key perspectives.

• Recontextualize everything in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition
• Explore problems as conflicts in a problem space
• Propose solutions that are adaptable skills rather than isolated techniques

While testing the full AI instructions I asked life-coach Claude to help me prepare for my fiction-writing series I’m launching next year. I asked for a weekly plan I could use to get started, and then my wacky idea struck—what if I employed the form of a meal-planning app as a way to tackle a week-long project? After all, I never forget to eat a meal. What if I used my meals as a trigger to complete 21 steps throughout the week. Breakfast introduces the day’s topic, lunch represents the bulk of the work, and dinner finishes it off. This gives me time to “digest” each part of the project.

And so I made a Project Meal Planner with WebSim using data generated by Claude.

And, since I was already posting my weekly summary of this week’s newsletter posts, I created another version that ties into this week’s writing exercises. Readers can track their progress throughout the week with the status saved to local storage.

Then I looked around and said, “How did I end up here?”