My Perennial Pesto Problem: The simple boost of a Note for Next Time
Last night, I made pesto. A lot of pesto. Twenty times the regular recipe. Five batches, each with quadrupled portions. I do this every summer.
My husband is the main gardener. Every summer, we plant two or three basil plants. The plants bulk up fast, climbing over each other’s shoulders in a tangle. The leaves are so green they seem to glow. Just as quickly, the plants start to go to seed. We rush to cut it all because going to seed is bad for flavor. It’s as exciting as vegetable gardening gets.
Then we make buckets of pesto. We eat pesto on crackers, tomatoes, pasta, salads, pasta-salads, eggs. Foist it on the neighbors. Freeze some.
Pesto is simple to make. Even in massive quantities, it’s more a question of time than effort or skill. But for a few years running, making the pesto was harder than it needed to be. Because I made the same exact mistake every year. I used way too much olive oil, and then had to fix it.
I don’t know why it was always too much olive oil. I just multiplied the recipe by 8 or 10, based on how the piles of basil leaves measured out in cups.
It’s Alice Waters’ recipe. It should be flawless. So every year I trusted it. Who was I not to?? And every year I had to go back and add more of everything else, bit by bit, uncertain what would work, until the sauce bulked up enough and the flavors balanced. Then I put the cookbook away, got to eating, and made the same mistake again the next time.
Until summer 2020. That summer, I fixed my annual mistake. I slowed down enough to think ahead. I took care of future-me. I made a note: “7/20 [meaning July 2020] did 8x recipe and needed ~½ - ¾ of olive oil in recipe.”
This week, as pesto week rolled around again, there it was in the cookbook. The note from past-me. So simple, so helpful, so reassuring. That note let me know what to do. It let me know I was good at this. helped me get started.
As important to me as the actual information in the note, is the way the note provides evidence and encouragement. If I’m tired and busy and wondering if the hours it takes to do the annual pesto production is worth it, the note from past-me says, “You’re good. You have done this before. You got this.”
For yourself or your team, a simple Note for Next Time helps in the same way. Whatever you are up to, whatever you call it: continuous improvement, innovation, resilience, overcoming inertia (or that phrase I don’t like “overcoming resistance”), building identity.
In project management, people use the grim term “project post mortem” for a structured meeting to figure out what to do again next time, and what to change. (There are lots of how-to guides online.)
In quality improvement, this idea of Notes for Next Time is applied repeatedly for process steps that happen regularly and very frequently (daily, weekly) through the small and short experiments called PDSAs.
What about you, for yourself and for your teams?
Do you take the moment to ask, “What can I tell future-me, so that this goes well the next time I do it?”
Do you have a place to put your Notes for Next Time where you will find them when you need them? (For me, it’s usually a note in my calendar, at the future time when I will do the thing again.)
