The original Cheaper By the Dozen is not a black and white movie or a PG-13 comedy starring Steve Martin, but it is a decades old book written by a man with a dozen children. I read the book a couple years ago (though the questionable content and bad language precludes me from recommending it to you or reading it aloud to my own children). The father was an efficiency expert by trade, studying movements and motions of company workers and making recommendations on how to increase the output by reducing the number of motions required to perform a task. I never heard of such a thing before. Nevertheless, the father employed the same method in his home and gave each child a reward whenever the child came up with a better method to perform a chore.

Efficiency is a subject that sometimes keeps me awake at night and occupies my thoughts, but never more especially than while I am caught waiting somewhere. With a houseful of little children and at least one more on the way, wasting time is not a pastime I should engage myself in too often. And so, while I am chopping garlic for dinner, folding clothes, or sitting at the piano, I will often ask myself, “Is there a better way to be doing this?”

Now, “better” is a relative term sometimes, and so I want to back up and say that I am looking for ways to increase my efficiency without compromising those things in which efficiency really has no place. For example, it would be more economically efficient to place my children in daycare (the younger ones in a local preschool and the older ones in a free public school) so that I could spend my days bringing home a respectable paycheck. But it would not be spiritually efficient. Likewise, it would be more economically efficient to just stop having children since we’ve finally figured out what causes it, but we believe that the monetary, physical, and emotional demands related to raising children do not compare to the reward of seeing faithful children serve Christ and His kingdom.

What I mean by efficiency is described with a basic definition of “the ratio of the effective or useful output to the total input in any system.” In other words, is there a better way? Living in a modern culture, we are programmed to believe that something is superior if it is faster, cheaper, and can be contained in a smaller package. But forty years of desert wondering tells us moderns that God has a bigger purpose than just getting us to Glory before our social security runs out. Indeed, God is efficient—because He never wastes—and we must keep in mind that His ways are better, especially if He should ask us to build an ark when it is not even raining.

And so, while I put the hammer to the nail, I co-labor with my five-year-old daughter, not because it is immediately efficient, but because in the end, it is the most efficient. I lose time and money on the onset; my daughter slows me down and she overuses materials. But it is the most efficient because she gains character, a good work ethic, time tying strings with her mother, and skills that she will need when she becomes a godly mother as well.

That was a long introduction just to say that I’ve been thinking about turning on my deep freezer again. A baby is on the way, and beginning in December, I will spend a lot of time on the couch complaining about how my back hurts. Being 5’2 and carrying 8 and ½ pound babies just makes me tired thinking about it. It is so much easier to ask my husband to stop by the Chinese take-out on his way home four times a week, than it is to use a little forethought and planning. And in this case, I think it is wise to be more economically efficient.

I remember when “Once a Month Cooking” was the latest craze, but I never really took to that model. Instead, I use a different method that seems to work well in our house. Whenever I make a casserole, a tray of stuffed shells, or other entrée, I make at least a double portion at the minimum. One portion is for the evening’s meal; the other portion is for the following night. We usually have the same main dish two nights in a row, but my husband doesn’t mind this as he thinks I cook pretty well. Whenever I have the foresight to triple it, I’ll freeze one of the portions. Now, however, it is time for me to step it up a notch and begin quadrupling recipes.

The reason why this is more efficient is because you can brown four pounds of meat in the same pan that you brown one pound. You are only washing one pan one time instead of one pan four times. And so on. This is just more physically efficient. When I get the pepper out of the cabinet to spice up a recipe, I can pour four teaspoons in the same amount of time that I can pour one. And I only have to retrieve the pepper out of the cabinet once.

This method will not only save you time, but it will also save you trips to the doctor. It is better for your health, because inevitably, your casserole is nutritionally superior than take-out food or boxed foods. You can not order brown rice from a menu. And when “one of those days” comes around, it is easier to pull dinner out of the freezer than put in a call to your husband on his way home.

This is the same method that I use to do the laundry. I only put away clothes once a week, because it is the same effort to put away two dishtowels as it is to put away a stack of ten dishtowels. However, less steps are required to put away ten dishtowels once every seven days than to put away two dishtowels every other day.

And so long as there are no moral restrictions (e.g. your kids are not left without clothes because you only wash once a week), than taking a minute to ponder the efficiency of your methods is time well spent.