Thanksgiving Production Schedule

Spreadsheets? In my thanksgiving?

It’s more important than you think.

Origins

I wanted to cook an elaborate Thanksgiving dinner, but had never attempted to cook such a large meal with so many different parts before.

Enter: the Gantt Chart style production schedule spreadsheet!

I first broke down the timeline into morning/afternoon/evening tasks on the three days leading up to Thanksgiving, then created 30-minute time blocks for the morning and 10-minute time blocks for the afternoon on the actual day-of. Dishes were assigned a color so I could easily locate components for each dish at a glance. I assigned each dish a location in the kitchen to ensure there was space for each item to be prepared and planned the meal so that all items needing to be placed in the oven had similar cooking temps.

There were a few hiccups along the way when executing this meal, but having everything planned out in this way allowed me to quickly make adjustments and all the food came out together, cooked properly, and the meal was served within 15 minutes of the originally planned meal time!

Evolution

What Changed

What stayed the same

The original spreadsheet had different time intervals for day-of production, I made the entire day use 10-minute time blocks to better visualize the flow of time.
One of our stove burners was not working so this burner was blocked out on the schedule to prevent overloading stove production capabilities.
Oven temp was moved to the top of the oven rows for aesthetic/logic reasons.

The color scheme was streamlined to group dishes together by category rather than assigning each dish a different color.
- Blue: appetizers
- Yellow: main dish
- Mauve: sides (vegetables)
- Purple: sides (non-vegetables)
- Green: drinks and dessert

Dish categorization was streamlined to show components of dishes in the same color family.
For example: the cranberry jelly used to stuff the turkey wellington was shown in purple on the original spreadsheet, but updated to yellow in v2.0 to show it is part of the turkey “project”.
Delegated tasks like “set the table” and “make coffee” were added.

The overall basic layout/functionality of the original spreadsheet was great and did not need improvement.
Use of distinctive color schemes helped very quickly visualize what was happening during each stage of the process.
The meal was served within 15 minutes of the original planned time, despite doubling the number of dishes and quadrupling the number of people eating the meal.