Your performace concerns are not necessary. The cronjob package has to check regularly, what jobs have to be run at a particular time; to check every minute is very reasonable. This check is very fast and won't kill the performance of your machine. It will run your job only at the specified time.
You can certainly reduce the effort and modify the cron package to run the check e.g. only every hour (or whatever), but this is not worth the effort and won't be noticable on any installation i know.