The Traditional Thanksgiving Gantt Chart
Thanksgiving is only two weeks away, like us, you’re probably starting to pick out a good Turkey recipe, decide side dishes, and pick out pies. That stuff is a lot of fun. We hosted our first ever Thanksgiving dinner last year. As we were planning for it, we decided we wanted to eat around three. We realized that to meet the 3pm deadline, we were going to need to work backwards and map out our prep times and oven times.
Enter the Gantt Chart
Gantt charts, the bane of project managers everywhere, are perfect for resource allocation. In this case, the resource is our oven and our prep hands. Last year we worked with graph paper and highlighters, this year we’re stepping it up to index cards, markers, and tape. The concept is pretty straight forward, treat each index card like an hours worth of time. If your turkey needs three hours at 325 degrees, write “Turkey 325″ across three index cards, and tape them together. If the same turkey needs a half hour of prep time, fold a card in half, tear along the line, and write “Turkey Prep, chop herbs and butter bird”.
Our Thanksgiving Gantt Chart
Work through each item on your menu. Then group them by temperature. Your turkey is going to dominate for three hours, can you shove a green bean casserole in there at 325? That will save time. Look at all your prep work, group veggie chopping tasks so you spend one stretch of a half hour at the chopping board, rather than remembering you have to chop another onion even though you just chopped one an hour ago.
Once you have all your groups, start laying things out. Because they’re all on big chunky index cards, you can move them around on the table. When you have a pattern that you like, that will help to streamline things, put it on your fridge with magnets, or tape it all together in one big Gantt blob and hang it on the wall. On Turkey day, you can scratch index card tasks off as you move through the chart, or feel really accomplishy and throw out the cards as each one is completed. Whatever you do, we guarantee you’re going to be eating at the time you said you would. Good work Turkey.
