We all have limited time and ability. I think what most employees get wrong is that they look at the engagement as what do I have to do and not what can I do. Even in the former case, entrepreneurs know that the buck ultimately stops with them. You have to be in the mindset to think creatively.
Tag: time management
May 8, 2024 – It’s Not the Time…
In December, one of my culinary book club peers gave me a sourdough starter. He is a tremendous bread maker and everything that he has shared seems nearly perfect. He says that the starter is over forty years old. Clearly, his efforts are the result of years of effort.
I didn’t ask for it, so I suspect that my wife did. Because as far as I knew, it was unsolicited and therefore I felt a sense of duty to keep it alive. Since December, I have made probably ten or so loaves of bread. All of them pretty marginal if I say so myself.
Like many of the things I do, I push the boundaries. I also don’t like waste. About a year or so ago, I accidently purchased some whole wheat flour. People in my house refuse to use it for anything, so I have been doing a half bread flour and half whole wheat flour loaves. The thing about whole wheat is that it does not develop the same gluten reaction and it comes out dense.
As a result, I have been messing around with the rise variables. The problem with sourdough is that left too long, it becomes gummy and thin, not bread at all but pancake batter. If not allowed to rise enough, it is a rock. Neither are desired results.
Ideally, this loaf would be 50% larger. I didn’t have time to let it sit for extra days nor did I actually have time to bake it properly. Hence, chock it up to another failure. But for every failure knowledge is gained. In this case, I used the oven off function because we had a doctor’s appointment to go to. All the while, the oven wasn’t on it continued to slowly dry out. It wasn’t a total puck but a 1/4″, rock hard crust all the way around.
Now to my point about time. Looking at the recipe, the only time listed as the bake time. It needs to bake at 400 degrees for approximately an hour. But, bread by its nature is way more complicated than that. Let us look at the variables and conditions.
First there is proofing time. This has been what has mostly been burning me. I find that in the winter, the kitchen temperature is not warm enough for dough to rise properly over night. This in turn puts it in jeopardy before I get started with meal planning. I think commercial operations use a proofing device or room for more consistent results.
Baking time is pretty straight forward. Some variability is expected but it is more or less along the time of the recipe. Another thing that burns me is bread needs to be done at least an hour before dinner. You cant just take it straight out of the oven to the table. I think if you are planning to eat by 6:00, bread should be done by 4:30.
Working backward, to be done by 4:30 it needs to be in the oven by 3:30. And don forget that the oven needs time to heat, so that means the oven needs to be turned on by 3. This means that the bread has to be risen by 3. If you check your progress at 12:00 and you don’t have the proper proofing, you are likely out of time to make perfect bread. So, you need to know whether you are going to gamble or throw in the towel for another day.
End Your Programming Routine: Now that I have written this all down, it seems simple. Hopefully, I can get my timing down such that all I really need to be concerned about is the proof. I am still working on that too. It is a good thing that I have to waste sourdough starter every week and I still have five pounds of wheat flour. Maybe I will get this figured out.
April 8, 2024 – Gotta Get Better
This is no toolbox fallacy, podcasting is what I am really up to. Unfortunately, it takes me too long to put one together. I enjoy the process and am happy to do it but for the time. I need to practice having less notes and still talking, making sense and not having too many fillers or pregnant pauses, especially in this difficult time. Bear with me as I practice with a story about how time is taken during this process.
December 21, 2022 – Stealing Time
Thou Shall Not Steal.
Unless you are taking wasted time and converting it into productivity. I have talked about this before but one hour a day adds up to seven hours a week. All of a sudden, you went from doing nothing in a week to almost one full workday’s worth of productivity. The key is setting goals and making your time productive.
What I mean by that is that if you can break your work up into bitesize chunks, then you can batch similar operations into short bursts. As an example, it takes time to setup the table saw. What you definitely don’t want to do is spend your one hour setting up a particular cut and then changing it as soon as you are complete (unless you are only cutting one of a particular setup). You may spend one hour setting up and then the next hour cutting everything.
I find if you start thinking this way, they your work becomes much more efficient. The added advantage of batching is that you have times between your work where you mind starts playing ‘job Tetris’. What can I do in an hour? What do I want to do to setup for the next session? How many of this operation do I have to do? Am I setup to get make the best use of my time?
A change that I have done to make my life easier is getting my tools on mobile bases. I don’t have the luxury of everything having a dedicated station so I have to move things around. This allows me to setup and clean-up without as much of the excuse of moving things around as a barrier. This has been a problem in the past because I say to myself, ‘I don’t want to start this because I will have to move everything to get the machine setup. I am want to do X and I only have the time to do Y which means it will be in the way until I can get back to it. Who knows when that will be, so some other time.’
Often times I have found that if I start to get project momentum, I start to cheat on my dedicated time and add 15 minutes more. Fifteen becomes thirty sometimes and before you know it, things are done. I would say rarely does one hour become forty-five minutes or less. That only happens when you don’t really have time and you try to push it.
I have started to steal time in the morning. My biological clock is trending toward early to bed and early to rise. On the weekend, if I get up at 5AM I may have three or four hours before anyone even wakes up. This is the perfect stolen time.
Before I had this revelation, I didn’t waste this time. It was time that I spent working on the blog and even doing some extra posting. But there are only so many hours in the day and I already spend a lot of time each week on this endeavor, so I want to use this time in the shop. I have created time in the shop that I didn’t have.
If there is one downside, it is that the shop door faces the bedroom window. That means that a lot of machine noise tends to easily carry toward my sleeping wife. Some operations particularly joining long boards, it is much easier to do with the door open. After confirming that this is an issue, I now try to guard against making a bunch of machine noise before six or seven. With that, I can turn the heater on and do quieter things or not start until a more reasonable time.
Maybe not a downside, but when I first open my eyes and kind of check the clock, I often see that it is time I can get up and I am motivated to get the day going. This sometimes takes a toll on getting a little extra sleep because my mind starts working.
End Your Programming Routine: I don’t have time is a common excuse for me. Sometimes it is true while most of the time it is not. I need to get to point where I am saying ‘How can I’ rather than ‘I can’t because’. You all know that I am not one to sit and watch TV or the phone. I can barely sit through one movie with my wife. That being said, we can all do better with the time that we have so look for that time you can steal.
Recent Comments