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How to Plan Your Baking Week in a Home Microbakery | Episode 2

  • Oct 16, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


It is so fun to have a huge menu full of things you love and get excited about baking. If you are trying to bake ten different items on a bake day, or you are offering twelve flavors of inclusion bread every week, you are going to burn yourself out.


I know the feeling of standing in the kitchen on a Thursday night with dough in the fridge, a list running in your head, and no real sense of when any of it is supposed to happen.


So here is my exact strategy for mapping out a week that gets the work done and still leaves room for your family and for you. Grab a notebook.


Start with your personal goals, not your bake schedule

Before you schedule a single bake day, answer two questions.


What are my top three goals in my personal life this week? We start with personal because you are more than your business. It might be quality time with your spouse, taking your kids to the library, a walk by yourself, or picking a hobby back up.


Then flip the same question around to the bakery. Increasing sales, posting twice on social media, testing a new recipe, replying to the person you have been meaning to reach out to.


It does not matter what they are. Write them down. Those six things are what the rest of your week has to protect, because an effective week means the most important things happen and some other things do not.


Time block the immovable things first

The strategy that holds this together is time blocking. You give every category of work an actual block on the calendar instead of hoping it fits somewhere.


Here is the part most people do backward. Block your personal priorities before you block anything for the bakery. If you looked at my schedule, you would see a block every single day for sleep and a block for my meals, and everything else built around those.


After sleep and meals, add your non negotiables:

  • School drop off and pickup

  • Your morning workout

  • Church or Bible study

  • Standing family commitments

Those are the rigid pieces. Once they are on the calendar, the bakery work goes into the space that is left.


If you are building your bakery alongside a job, bend all of this around your work schedule. You have a big immovable chunk of your day, and time blocking is even more useful for you because it makes you see exactly which pockets of time you actually have.


What my week actually looks like

Here is a farmer's market week at my bakery so you can see how the blocks stack up.


Monday is generally my off day, or my grocery day. I block a two hour chunk for groceries, plus time for swimming with my kids or taking them to the library. Monday is also when I order packaging, pre measure ingredients, and prep my starter.


Tuesday is a light prep day. I prep scones and get my inclusions ready for my bread dough, and I still block time for a coffee date or a museum trip with my kids. If I can chop all my herbs and shred all my cheese in one sitting, that work is done and out of my head until I need it. That is what batching really buys you. Fewer open loops in your brain.


Wednesday and Thursday are my dough days. Wednesday I mix the bulk of my rustic loaf dough first thing, do my stretch and folds in my bins, then leave an open block before I come back to shape and get everything into the fridge. If there is room, I mix cookie dough and scone dough. Cookies go into the fridge for a day and then into the freezer until I need them. Scone dough goes straight to the freezer.


Thursday I mix sandwich bread dough, focaccia, and whatever else is on the menu that week, usually four or five hours across a couple of blocks.


Friday is my big bake day, with all of the dough already prepped and waiting in the fridge. Saturday is market day, and sometimes I bake off cookies and scones first, up around six to turn the oven on and out the door by eight.


If spreading tasks across Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday does not fit your life, condense them into one bigger prep day. The shape is yours. The principle is that every piece of work has a home on the calendar.


Reverse engineer your bake day

Friday is the day I plan backward instead of forward, and this one change takes more stress out of a bake day than anything else I do. I start by deciding when I want to be in bed. For me that is about eight o'clock, because I love sleep. Then I work backward:

  • In bed by eight, so winding down at seven

  • Dinner together at six

  • Bread packaged by five, which means out of the oven early enough to cool

  • Packaging takes an hour, so I start packaging at four

  • Five hours of baking means the oven goes on between ten and eleven

Now I know exactly when my day starts, and I know it ends with me rested and ready for market. Do this the day before, never on the morning of the bake.


Give admin and marketing a block of their own

Your week also needs time for the business tasks that are not baking. Managing your website, planning social content, bookkeeping, answering messages.


I do mine on Monday, the day I work the least. Having one dedicated day is what makes them actually happen. I used to think I could knock them out between batches going in the oven, and it never really happened.


Streamline so the week takes less out of you

A few ways to work smarter instead of harder:

  • Prep in advance where you can. Use part of Monday to pre measure ingredients, clean your equipment, and reset your space, so you are not organizing in the middle of everything else.

  • Automate what repeats. Write a month of social content at once and use a scheduling tool to post it, so you are not logging in and losing an hour to the scroll. Set up automated replies for your frequently asked questions.

  • Template your customer messages. I use texting more than email, so I keep a text template ready. When a customer says she is running late or asks to pick up tomorrow instead of today, I change the name and send it.

  • Outsource when the math works. I get groceries delivered sometimes, because the hour I would spend shopping is worth more spent on bakery work. I am willing to pay the delivery fee when that is true.


Simplify your menu

This is the one that saves the most time, and it is the hardest one to do.


Pick a core selection of products you love, that give you consistent results, and that your customers come back for. Bring in a new flavor every week or two if you want. Do not bring in five.


For me, simplifying also meant saying no to custom requests. I do not take them at all. I will consider a flavor request for a future menu, but I am not baking a one off special for one person in a given week. If your business has custom work built into it and you price and schedule accordingly, that is fine. If it does not, take that stressor out of your business.


A smaller menu makes your bake schedule predictable, and it builds your brand identity too. The only sweet I consistently offer is my cookies, and people know and love my cookies. I rotate my scones and do not even offer them every week. People know what to expect from me, and that is worth more than variety.


If you are a year or two in

Once you have real revenue, the week becomes a capacity question. Look at your last four weeks and ask two things.


Which product takes the most hands on time for the money it brings in? That is your first candidate to take off your menu or to reprice.


Where does your week actually break? If the answer is always Thursday night, your prep is stacked too late and one more Tuesday block would fix it.


Build in rest, and expect the week to move

Running a microbakery from home is rewarding and fulfilling, and it is also demanding and exhausting. Schedule your downtime the same way you schedule your dough. An hour for a bath after the kids go down, a quiet afternoon with a book, coffee with a friend. If you are depleted, you are not going to show up well for anybody.


Then plan for the plan to change. I once blocked out a weekend to record podcast episodes while my kids were with my mother in law, and then she was not able to take them. I moved my recording day and got on with it. Small disruptions happen all the time, so leave yourself some slack.


And when something goes right, celebrate it. Block an hour for a big win, and have an idea ready for the small ones too. That is part of what keeps you loving this work six months from now.


Final thoughts

A good week is the one where your three personal goals and your three bakery goals actually happened, and you still got to bed on time on Friday.


Pick one thing to change this week. Put sleep and your non negotiables on the calendar first, then reverse engineer your next bake day starting from your bedtime. That alone will change how Friday feels!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this got you thinking about your own rhythms, these three go deeper.


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