According to a 2025 study, men who cook spend roughly 50 minutes a day preparing meals, while women average about 71 minutes, meaning many home cooks are spending close to an hour or more in the kitchen daily. But with so many other demands filling our days—from carpools and school to 9-to-5 jobs, dog walks, and endless to-dos—an hour in the kitchen can feel like an eternity.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways to shave precious minutes off your kitchen time so you can focus on something—anything—else instead. Here are a few easy-to-implement tips from the pros in the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen and Good Housekeeping Institute Kitchen and Cooking Lab that will help you get meals on the table faster.
Use a bench scraper
You can cut down on your cooking time by investing in a few low-cost tools, starting with a bench scraper.
“I always use my bench scraper,” says kitchen reviews analyst Eva Bleyer. “I prepare a lot of veggies, and a bench scraper makes transferring my veggies into my pan or bowl just so much quicker and easier.”
This tool, however, can do a lot more than help prepare vegetables. It's also good for baking bread, icing cakes, and really, whatever you can dream up. Best of all, you can get a great one for under $10.
Embrace the microwave
The microwave is an underrated kitchen workhorse that does far more than reheat leftovers.
“Pre-cooking dense vegetables in the microwave before roasting” is one way recipe editor Susan Choung, likes to use hers. “It dramatically slashes oven time for potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash—without sacrificing those crisp, caramelized edges on the sheet pan.”
Want to further level up your microwave game? You can use this kitchen appliance to quickly defrost frozen meats, crisp up bacon, toast nuts, and more.
Speed up water boiling
As the saying goes, a watched pot never boils—but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to speed up the process.
“If I’m boiling a large amount of water (like for pasta), I start some in the pot and heat the rest in my electric tea kettle,” says Choung. “Each one gets to a rolling boil much faster, then I combine the two—no standing around waiting.”
Bonus: electric kettles can be both functional and countertop-worthy.
Use your air fryer
If you don’t already own an air fryer, consider this your sign to buy one.
Anyone who likes a convection oven should try an air fryer, says kitchen appliances lab director Nicole Papantoniou. “It barely requires preheating, cooks food remarkably quickly, and makes things extra crispy.”
It’s one of the easiest ways to cut down cook time without sacrificing texture or flavor—especially if you live in a household of one or two people.
Choose the right ingredients
Saving time starts at the grocery store.
“I like to have quick-cooking foods on hand, like brown rice, vermicelli noodles, couscous, and canned beans,” says Papantoniou. “Don’t be afraid to use packaged foods. There are some great sauces out there, and lots of great frozen options, too.”
Pre-prepped ingredients can help, too.
“I swear by Dorot Garden cubes for frozen minced garlic and grated ginger,” deputy food editor Trish Clasen Marsanico. “Nine out of 10 times I’ll pop one of those into a skillet and am so grateful I didn’t have to do the peeling, slicing, and chopping prep.”
Order groceries online
One of the biggest time-savers doesn’t happen in the kitchen at all. All it requires is downloading an app (or opening a web browser).
“I find it so much easier—and faster—to place a grocery order online than to drive to the store and shop in person,” says Clasen Marsanico. “You skip walking up and down each aisle, and it’s way easier to plan out your meals for the week when you’re shopping from your computer at home.”
For this tip, you will have to do a little research to see which services are available near you, and maybe do a bit of trial and error to see which one offers the best deals, but the juice will certainly be worth the squeeze when you start saving yourself those grocery store trips.
Read a recipe start to finish
Think you're saving time by skimming through a recipe? Wait, it's a trap!
“Following a recipe? Read the whole thing before you even start to gather ingredients,” says Clasen Marsanico. “Many—like ours!—are written in ways that encourage you to multitask to save time. For example, while a pot of pasta is cooking, you’ll be chopping and prepping your sauce rather than waiting for the pasta to be done.”
And if you need a little more guidance, keep an eye out for the word "meanwhile" in recipes, which Clasen Marsanico says, “is usually the magic word that signifies you’ll be multitasking and saving time.”
