Time Management, Circuits, and Pizza

I had a realization while making pizza earlier. It was about the discrepancy between what I was doing (and would later be doing) in preparation for cooking, and how one might write a recipe for making pizza. Normally, in a recipe, everything is presented in a step-by-step manner, so as not to overwhelm the person attempting to follow it (a reasonable course of action, especially for someone trying the recipe out for the first time). My style of cooking (at least with pizza) involves doing multiple things simultaneously, mostly because it's either do that, or do nothing for several minutes at a time. It had occurred to me that the two cooking styles were like the two basic methods of setting up a circuit: the recipe does things in series, while I do things in parallel.

A series circuit has all the individual components set up one after another. A parallel circuit has a point at which it branches out into multiple lines (often with one or more components on each line) which eventually come back together. And now that I've had time to do a little research, I find that there's a third type of circuit: the combination circuit (which as the name suggests, is a combination of series and parallel). Actually, looking at the pictures, combination circuit is more of my style than anything (please be patient with me, it's been a few years since I took Physics).

When preparing pizza, ff I can, I try to do something when I have a few minutes to work, though I will normally come back to the first thing when I need to. There just happen to be several points where I have a few minutes, and I've taken to taking advantage of them. Here are some examples:

- I take the two units of dough out to let them rise (I use store bought dough). That takes 45 minutes. While that's going on, I fried up some pieces of sausage, then cut up some mushrooms, and then cut up some onion pieces.

- It takes the oven 6 minutes to get up to the temperature for baking. While that's going on, I spread out the dough for the first pizza, and get started on the sauce (the sauce I do make myself).

- While the first pizza is pre-baking for 6 minutes (to get a nice, crispy crust), I work on spreading the dough of the second pizza, and finish the sauce.

- The first pizza comes out, the second pizza goes in (again, 6 minutes of pre-baking). Put down some sauce and cheese onto the first pizza while I wait.

- Second pizza comes out, first pizza goes in (18 minutes, baking). I now have plenty of time to put sauce on the second pizza, along with those toppings I was working on while the dough was rising.

I like to think of my method as efficient management of my time, or at least as controlled chaos. It may seem like madness, but there is a method in it. And as I said, it's this, or standing around for several minutes at a time broken up by trying to do a bunch of things, or setting up everything before-hand. I like to have it where I take one thing out of the oven, and can immediately put the next thing in. Partly because of the efficiency, but mostly because that way I can eat that much sooner. (By that point in the day, I am starting to get kinda hungry.)

It was simply interesting to compare circuits and pizza-making. Two radically different things, and yet, if you look a little closer, you'll start to find similarities showing up.

What other things have such hidden similarities?