Breeding - How do you keep track of your projects?

[dancing_serpent]

I have a couple of breeding projects going on and I'm having trouble keeping track of them. When to breed, which dragon to breed to which partner to avoid inbreeding, and so on. I keep forgetting about these things. The only project that's easy to track for me is my purebred red dorsal one.

So my question is, how do you keep track of your projects? Do you have a spreadsheet or something? I'd like to organise my breeding a bit more, so I don't always stumble around, and maybe actually manage to finish something.

Comments

[krait]

I'm hardcore old-school, so my answer to this is:

spiral-bound notebook.


:D It helps somewhat that I'm a lazy, or at least intermittent, breeder, because I don't 'schedule' when each should be bred, I just breed when I have scroll space. (I tend to kind of alternate between raising broods of abandoned eggs, raising broods produced for breeding projects, and raising broods produced for trade.) When I do have space, though, I just hit up the notebook to see where I left off, and go from there. It works pretty well. Maybe I could scan a page?

[krait]

I should add, too, that I custom-sort so that I can put all CBs at the top of their breed group, all 2nd-gens under that, etc. Many groups I also apply naming conventions to cue me ("Regal" is always CB, "Resplendent" always 2nd-gen, etc.) and make a neat if subtle theme. For projects that are going to be particularly large and involve a lot of participants, especially those of a breed(s) that I'm using in other projects, I include a reminder in the name: a Magi named "Something Something Ember", for instance, is part of my Magi/Ember project, and I won't accidentally breed it to one of my Magi/Magma dragons when working on that project.

[dancing_serpent]

I custom sort, too, though more by breed than by lineage project so far. For my army of Red Dorsals I have a reverse sort - the highest gen on the top, the CBs down at the bottom.

I've been using naming cues, as well, but just something simple like CB or 4PB added to the name. And I delete those cues when I got the egg I wanted from that pairing. Again, only doing this with my red dorsals.

[dancing_serpent]

I'd love to see a scan!

Yeah, I'm also more the intermittent breeder - mainly because my head is full of other stuff and I often find myself thinking "oh hey, there's that Flamingo/Thunder lineage that still needs a bit of work, when did I breed them last?". *g*