This year I’m hosting Thanksgiving for the first time. For those not familiar with Thanksgiving, here’s more information but basically the day revolves around a huge meal. The key to a successful Thanksgiving dinner is first not drying out the turkey and second, timing everything so all of your side dishes are ready once the turkey has been carved (some might add plenty of alcohol or a large screen tv for watching football but I figured I’d stick with just two points).
Anyways, since this is my first time hosting Thanksgiving dinner I wanted to make sure everything came out. According to the cooking magazines you should create yourself a time schedule so you don’t forget anything. The second I read that I turned to Project (inspired by a previous Thanksgiving post). I have a few resources – myself, my husband, one of my guests who wants to make dressing at my house, my oven burners (400% availability), and my oven. I have a new oven that is one of the split units with a small top oven and a large bottom oven so I’ve listed them out separately with 200% capacity since they can fit two pans each. By the way, if anyone is in the market for a new oven – I love this configuration!
My resources:
Resource Name | Max. Units |
Chef | 100% |
Big Oven | 200% |
Little Oven | 200% |
Husband | 100% |
Guest | 100% |
Burners | 400% |
My tasks list (partial):
When I was creating my tasks list, I only originally started with name and duration. The first thing I scheduled was the turkey since it takes the longest to bake. I knew we wanted to eat at 4 so I used Start-to-Finish links to work backwards from there so I’d know what time I needed to start prepping/then roasting the turkey. For the other items I turned to the Team Planner view to schedule out my work:
Since my guests are arriving at 2:30, I’m trying to have as much done as possible by then so I kept that in mind when building my schedule. My husband actually has more going on during the day since he’s smoking a turkey too but he mocked my schedule so I’m not including those tasks…
Now if you want to get really creative with the Team Planner view, you can color everything per item:
Additionally, through the new Project reporting feature, you can see how much work everyone/everything has to do:
I have just a little more work than the oven but part of my work is eating the dinner so I can’t complain too much. :-)
One other tip – I’m using a custom field in my tasks list to track oven temperatures.
I hope this helps you prepare your Thanksgiving dinner or any other big meal you make be cooking. Happy Thanksgiving!