It's ten to six. You've parked, but in your head you're still finishing a sentence from the last meeting. The front door opens before you've found your keys, and the first thing anyone says is: what's for dinner?
Fair question. You have no idea.
Pasta takes fifteen minutes. You've made it hundreds of times, and you could do it with your eyes half shut. If dinner were only about cooking, six o'clock would be the easiest part of the day.
What makes it hard is that those first twenty minutes at home ask you to be three people at once. The one who's still at work. The one who has to decide what everyone's eating. And the one somebody needs right now, for homework, a lost shoe, or a story that can't wait.
Any one of those is fine. All three in the same quarter of an hour is what tips a perfectly good day over at the very end.
The drive or the train is supposed to be the gap between work and home. It rarely is. You read one more message at the traffic lights, you replay a conversation, and you walk in with your head still half in the office.
That's normal. Switching takes time, and the evening doesn't wait for it. So the question isn't how to switch faster. It's how to ask less of yourself while you're still switching.
The change that helps most is a small one: know what's for dinner before you walk through the door. Not cooked. Decided.
A decision made at lunchtime costs nothing. The same decision at ten to six, with the fridge door open and three voices behind you, costs more than the cooking itself. Take it out of that moment and the twenty minutes suddenly have room in them.
How you decide is up to you. A rough plan for the week on Sunday. A big pan of something that covers two evenings. Or, on the evenings you already know will be full, a meal that's already cooked and needs three minutes in the microwave. Any of them works, as long as the question is answered before six.
This one sounds backwards. When you get home, don't go straight to the kitchen.
Take your coat off. Sit down with whoever's there for five minutes. Hear the story that couldn't wait. The kitchen isn't going anywhere, and dinner will be ten minutes later at most.
What you get back is an evening that starts with you at home, rather than still on your way there. It feels slower. It usually goes faster, because nobody is pulling at your sleeve while the water boils.
Six o'clock will never be the calmest hour of the day. There's too much going on for that, and some of it is the good kind of noise.
But it doesn't have to be the hour where a good day goes wrong. Take one decision out of it, and it's simply the hour when everyone comes home.
One less decision on busy evenings? Have a look at this week's menu — twelve dishes, a different line-up every week, and you can skip any week you don't need it.
Read next: Dinner in the first weeks of school: how to keep it simple