Once you’ve got a budget for next month, at least as far as food is concerned, let’s doing at least a little preliminary work to plan what you’d like to eat. Proper planning prevents poor performance and all such clichés.

Now is not the time to decide that you’re also going to make sweeping changes to your diet (unless your doctor has recently told you to do such a thing) or get ambitious with your diet goals. You will likely be snacking while at your desk, and emphasizing your healthier cravings (for me that’s things like bell peppers, cucumbers and hummus, green beans, tomato slices, artichoke and spinach dip, etc.) is a good idea. However if you think those health snack bars are gross or yogurt makes you squeamish, don’t decide that your snacks should all be good for you snacks you have no interest in eating. Find the balance between healthy snacks that you like and delicious snacks that you make you happy. Even if you need to feel like you’re suffering to write, making yourself grumpy over food will likely not encourage words to flow out of you.

To help organize your food stuffs and keep you on budget, I recommend Paprika. It’s a recipe management app available for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows devices. It allows you to store recipes, make meal plans, keep track of what you have in your pantry, and create grocery lists from your chosen recipes. The app costs between $4.99 and $19.99, depending on if you’re getting the smartphone or desktop version. I have both iOS and Mac apps and my partner has the Android app. The biggest downside to the app is that we weren’t able to figure out how to sync our apps so that we could collaborate on meal plans and grocery lists. I still highly recommend the app as a time-saver (it is also not particularly helpful against grocery store impulse buys).