Until three or four years ago, I was cooking traditionally. Because that required many hours, I could not do that daily, so I was cooking for the entire week during one day of the weekend, which was mostly lost to this activity.

Then I have switched to cook everything in a microwave oven (which I had previously used for decades only for reheating food), including things like baking home-made bread. This allows very short and perfectly reproducible cooking times. Many kinds of food, typically those with high water content, like potatoes or meat, can be just roasted in closed glass vessels without adding anything to them and they are much tastier than when they are boiled, without needing to fry them in cooking oil. Other vegetables are better boiled in water with salt, but regardless of the method all vegetables require less than a quarter of hour in the oven.

Since then, I am cooking every day what I eat just before I need it, which takes less than half of hour from start to finish for all operations, when cooking vegetables.

Meat required less preparation time but more time in the oven (at reduced power levels), depending on what kind of meat it was, e.g. up to 30 minutes, so when I was eating meat I was cooking it separately, in amounts sufficient for several days, and I was cooking everything else just before the meal, when it was combined with the precooked meat.

So with some experimentation, it is possible to find ways to cook your food without wasting too much time and energy with that.