This is the discussion and support thread for:
- Johnny.Decimal University
- Task and Project Management
- Tasks: Scheduling and doing
- Task and Project Management
Post freely below! 
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I just watched the ‘Logbook and terminology’ lesson because I’m doing the course myself now…
And I practised doing a ‘Continue Search’ that includes the Logbook and surfaced checked tasks from 2019 (!)
I feel deep shame that I’ve been using Things since at least 2019 and, only now, am I learning about all its features and handy keyboard shortcuts. 
I’m clearly not a software-button-clicker like @johnnydecimal. But that is going to change… 
I’m curious for others’ ideas about the following type of recurring task. I know that @johnnydecimal bakes with sourdough as well when long enough in one kitchen:
feeding a sourdough starter, starting a dough. Ideally it happens on a regular schedule. My feeling says it would be nice to have it be habitual, and not need attention in the ‘task management system.’ But in my experience, this gets derailed too often. Other schedule constraints interfere, as do extreme weather swings causing the microscopic friends’ lifecyle to get out of sync with my schedule. The problem being that timing is the absolute essential ingredient for a good result.
So I’m beginning to think I’ll need to add this to my daily review, and on days I’m baking bread, break out a full checklist with reminders to check the starter’s state at certain times, then the same for the dough, etc.
Which feels like way too much work, and also the context switching through the (work) day hurts a lot. Any ideas, is that just how it is, or do you succeed in getting this ‘below the threshold’ for needing to appear in your TM system?
One rather different approach I’m toying with is creating much larger spans of time to focus on certain things. Like, a week or even more at a time. My (self-)employment and primary housekeeper role mean that I could theoretically alternate whole weeks between baking-and-cooking, work-projects, home-improvement (at least, weeks in which one of those is my primary focus). The bacterial army can survive on a fixed regimen in the off-weeks, and in the on-week would have my full attention to make sure I deploy them at the right time.
For what it’s worth, I was always very lax with my sourdough and it never let me down! I don’t know enough about the process to know whether it could have been objectively better had I treated it differently.
I was generally making bread every 3-7 days depending on the week. So I was always touching the starter, and I just did it by sight. Needs more? Chuck more in. The only ‘science’ I did was to weigh out my bread + water additions to make them the same.
Sometimes, If I’d been baking a lot that week, I was refilling a jar of what looked like fresh, healthy sourdough. Sometimes it was a jar of a substance that looked like separated batter. It never seemed to care. Actually I wondered – again, with no scientific basis – whether the variety helped introduce more organisms. (Also I tried random flours every now and then. But mostly just white bread flour.)
Now, if you did want to track it, this feels like a textbook ‘nudge task’, no? But I say, care less about it! Turns out, it’s hard to kill a jar of bacterial goop.