Cornelia Hoskin uses an Excel spreadsheet. Every weekend, she sits down at her computer and plans the upcoming week’s breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and dinners. She chooses recipes she’s collected on the social networking site Pinterest, organizes them by day and meal, and prints out a hard copy to post inside a kitchen cabinet. From there she makes a grocery list and a game plan.

“The last thing I want this to sound like is black-belt parenting,” says Hoskin, 43, of Jamaica Plain. She has a day job as marketing director at FarmAid in Cambridge, and on top of fixing dinners, needs to provide her toddler son’s day care with daily lunches and snacks. “I’m so frazzled and busy, if I didn’t have a checklist I wouldn’t remember what to do.”