Experienced bakers can judge dough by touch. That kind of feel only comes from a lot of ordinary mornings.

Feel is not a gift that arrives, it is residue left by repetition. Someone who can tell by touch that dough needs two more minutes has handled thousands of batches, most of them unremarkable, a few of them wrong. The ordinary mornings are where the judgment gets built, which is why there is no shortcut to it. What looks like instinct is really memory you cannot see.

Choose something you want to be able to judge without thinking and give it reps that are boring on purpose. Make the same drink, the same drill, the same scale, and pay attention to how today differs from yesterday.