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… 
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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.
Yeah, I guess the bacterial goop is a distraction from the real question here. In my case, timing is important. Not for the starter to survive, but for getting a good rise at the end of the process. I guess it’s because I use a minimal-kneading method, so gluten development depends primarily on the bacteria.
Anyways, that’s all irrelevant: there are probably infinite ways to successfully make sourdough bread. (yes, figuring out a different method which is more time-insensitive is also an option).
The point is: a task which is highly time-sensitive within the day, but feels like a huge interruption to the day’s main activities. You could substitute ‘putting in the next load of wash’ or ‘remember to take the meat out of the freezer at 12h’ or ‘go bring the recycling containers back from the road before noon’ or anything else like this.
I think the answer is: this has to be a P2. It has to go on the calendar, and I have to get real about what kind of commitment this is. Otherwise it will always feel like an unwanted interruption. And, if my main work for the day requires deep focus, either I will always put this task off until it’s too late (e.g. bacterial activity is already subsiding), or I will feel resentful and distracted when doing this task. Or both.
And of course, if this means I have too many P2s on my list for day, then I need to examine whether ‘baking sourdough bread regularly’ fits in my life. Hence the idea of batching stuff in week-long stretches. Because, technically, it’s hard to schedule something which might be ready for action when you’ve scheduled it, but it might be an hour later.
This is an interesting statement given that ‘baking sourdough’ is, presumably, what you’d count as a hobby? It’s something you do because you want to, not because you have to; it’s something you actively enjoy.
I think you’re right, it’s a P2. But how about trying to flip this from being ‘an interruption’ and instead making it ‘an opportunity to take a break’?
I’ve said somewhere (aha, I blogged it) that I miss cooking, because it’s one of the few times that I’m never distracted. Maybe this is a (scheduled) opportunity mid-way through the day to take a meditative moment?
he. Yes, except that my housemates – the humans as well as their gut symbiants – much prefer my bread to storebought, and it’s about 1/3 the price too. So yeah …
Again, maybe we should completely forget about sourdough. Maybe the more general question is how to sanely work from home and combine that with busy household tasks. And I think the answer is to schedule more things as P2s.
Maybe I do also need to lighten up a bit. Hopefully sometime soon we can raise a glass of some other fermented stuff together.
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As someone who does research that involves bacterial cultures every now and again, there’s two main tricks researchers use to make this easier:
- Don’t schedule things in the middle of other things. A lot of research grade protocols incubate things overnight so its the last thing you think about in the afternoon at 5pm and the first thing you think about in the morning at 9am.
- Have a 9am measurement that tells you how well the overnight incubation has gone, so you know how to deal with the first hour or two in the day.
I’m not a baker but if you asked me to apply these principles to sourdough I’d say something like “overnight first rise, morning second rise and baking time get adjusted based on how first overnight rise went so if it didn’t exactly double overnight I’d change the protocol for the second rise accordingly, maybe knead 30s extra or something.”
This is great: advice from two Johns, seemingly contradictory, but both apt. while @johnnydecimal’s questions helped me remember this is something I want to do and thus lighten up a bit, @clappingcactus your suggestions fits well with the realisation that I’ll get more enjoyment out of this hobby if I define and follow my protocols more rigorously.
Actual science must prevail and I gladly defer to @clappingcactus. 
Just to clarify, both @johnnydecimal are actually on the same page.
Our advice is only contradictory on the surface. I would leave a lot of room for protocol flexibility during a morning measurement/adjustment. I’d recommend second rise and bake to be based on feel for what’s right.
And thinking this way (more flexibility injected into second rise) removes the stress and prescriptivism for the whole process.
Have fun first and foremost.
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Yes, both perspectives are extremely helpful!
I’m happy for the advice on sourdough specifically. I was really trying to ask a more general question, using sourdough as an example. @johnnydecimal’s questions helped me see that there was a pattern going on in me, of seeing things as interruptions. That’s the root cause. However, in my case, ‘just have fun’ wouldn’t work. Then my hobby gets pushed out, and the quality suffers. I need a bit of predictability amid many competing responsibilities. The issue was that I was feeling like sourdough, hanging up the wash, etc. were too different from the ‘important’ things to go on the same task management list. Not so. This week I figured out that by assigning a time to more things, I could see better how much was really on my plate, and that helped me to relax. Yesterday I set alarms for all the steps needed, and that worked well. And @clappingcactus’s suggestion about building flexibility into the protocol helps to then relax when schedule conflicts arise after all. Just adjust and try again.
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On the concept of blocking time at work. Cal Newport’s concept of Office Hours was super helpful for me. Any communication from Teams or email that requires something more than a “yes, will do” or “here is [xyz resource or answer]”, I ask them to come to one of my scheduled office hours (real-time, synchronous collaboration time). During those times, I can hop on a Teams call, answer the phone, look at them face to face. Synchronous collaboration and communication. Outside of those standing office hours, I have a link to schedule with me. If someone schedules during a conflicting time, such as time blocked time for a project or my tasks, I decline it and refer them to very reasonable, recurring times or a scheduling tool that only allows scheduling into open calendar spots.
Allows boundary setting and also reasonable, regular times I am available for back and forth collaboration that is more complex than acknowledging I will do something or providing a tangible resource or concrete answer.
Great strategy. I did something similar when I ran a small desktop support team. We were always getting walk-ups, which was cool – quicker than dealing with an email. But they could be disruptive.
I found an old whiteboard and stuck it at the entrance to our pod. The first half-hour of every hour was ‘open’. The second ‘closed’. Did the job![1]
Except that time the office cretin walked up, read the sign, must have known fine well that we were ‘closed’, and moved it out of the way and walked in anyway. I told him to get lost. ↩︎