Most supper/dinner meals are made on a Saturday or Sunday. Then during the week we just grab and heat it up in the microwave. I usually only spend about an hour making whatever it is - soup, hot dish, lasagna, spaghetti, stew, etc. If I don’t eat whatever is already prepped, I make a grilled cheese, frozen pizza or something else that takes less than 1/2 hour.
Breakfast and lunch are always under 15 minutes.
I count time I’m in the kitchen. I don’t like to leave stuff on the stove without me being there, so the cleanup I do while something is simmering is in parallel to the cook time and so doesn’t count.
In grad school I worked on scheduling algorithms that included resource dependencies, and cooking falls nicely into that category. Especially if you run out of burners or want two things in the oven at the same time. And if you wished you could draw data dependency graphs for a meal, with parallel lines for the side dishes which don’t depend on any part of the main dish.
I consider this twice every day, for about half an hour each time. We have only two very spoiled cats, who get canned food twice a day. I mix a powdered supplement for skin health into both bowls in the morning and break apart and sprinkle two capsules into the older cat’s bowl in the evening. The older cat has marginal kidney values for her age and is prone to UTIs, so she needs extra water. The vet said it wouldn’t be bad to make sure the younger one gets plenty of water as well, so I mix a quarter cup of extra water into both bowls. The older cat has no teeth except her little incisors; the younger is an eating machine who can clear his own bowl and anyone else’s in under a minute. He’s also a bully about food who’s much bigger than she is and can easily shoulder her aside if no one’s looking. Because of this, I spread his food on a spiny rubber mat that forces him to lick the food up slowly, and I have to supervise closely to be sure he doesn’t decide to finish her bowl first.
Every time we go away and I hire a petsitter, I realize just how unreasonable this is about halfway through showing the process. Luckily(?), the last few times we’ve traveled, good friends of the family who are already on board with this kind of overboard wackiness have volunteered.