Nobody lies in the bathtub at 5.50am reading management theory textbooks. Nobody, that is, but me.
A recent management theory textbook introduced me to the concept of the Gantt Chart. It definitely did not leap out at me as revolutionary. It was the sort of thing that anybody with a modicum of organisational skills would look at and go ‘ho-hum, so this is what they are passing off as management to justify the price of an MBA qualification.’
The magic came when I started applying this newly discovered (for me, anyway) methodology to my recently avowed process of organising weekly batch cooks during peak sunshine hours so as to maximise the return on investment from my solar panels.
Batch cooking for a week is not a simple process. I envy the soulful spirits who have been organised enough to do this for years. There are a lot of logistics involved. Logistics and a degree of jeopardy.
It adds an extra stage to your organisation that often reveals, and in this case did reveal, the gaps and deficiencies in the planning process.
The Gantt Chart is organised along two dimensions – on the x axis, the list of tasks to compete, thoroughly broken down. On the y axis, you include the resource limitations, most notably time. The Gantt Chart will force you to think through each of the stages that need to be completed, and the time allocation to each, as well as the points where the various tasks need to overlap. The Gantt Chart eliminates the demotivational complexes that flow from simple disorganisation and project cluttering. It uninhibits motivation.
It can reveal the exposure of tasks to resource limitations beyond the resource of time. For instance, in my kitchen I have a cast iron skillet, a Dutch oven, some trays for baking. I also have only three (yes, I know) functional elements on my stove top and limited shelf space and height in my oven.
The steps to arrive at a proper Gantt Chart are equally important. Any fool can write a shopping list. And just about anyone can list out a sequence of activities and then map them from first to last. It’s what happens when you list out these items, then attach them to a particular time use or resource, that you can begin to see where the gaps lay in your planning.
You think you’ve got it all mapped out. You think you’ve included every last item on your list. Believe me, you haven’t. Particularly with cooking. When I went through and attached every cooking and reading stage to a particular 15 minute time slot, I realised: I hadn’t soaked the beans.
These are black-eyed beans and rajma beans we are talking about. Basically, the most incendiary of beans for delicate digestive systems. What was perhaps worse, the recipe for black-eyed beans is to boil them, then let them sit for a full hour, before draining and rinsing and recooking. I hadn’t allowed time to let them sit.
The great thing about the Gantt Chart is it allows you to see in advance just how best laid your best laid plans really are.
Apart from that little disaster, however, the batch cook was a resounding success. The Gantt Chart enabled me to map out the entire day of cooking and food production, tying the most energy intensive processes to the peak sunshine hours. It even led me to totally reorder the day for maximum energy efficiency, as the task I had left until last was the biggest solar guzzler, and when I saw it I realised I had to go back to the drawing board.
They say little about Gantt Charts in your classic Jamie Oliver cookbook. But every kitchen should have one.
More for my own use (I do not expect anyone to ever download an actual Gantt Chart from my blog), I have included the Gantt Chart that I used today as a template spreadsheet which can easily be customised to a billion different occupations, only some of which need apply to dramatically reducing household energy consumption and increasing the ROI of solar panels.
