Sourdough bread can be made with only 10 minutes worth of effort on your part. The rest is all waiting, waiting and waiting. Waiting to ferment, waiting to bake, waiting to cool.
There is a belief out there that you have to be really accurate with your timings and do certain stages of the process at exact times, but this is simply not true. The sourdough process is VERY flexible when it comes to when you need to tend to it.
We’ve all seen those YouTube videos out there of experienced bakers showing off their shaping skills by handling extremely wet and sticky doughs with ease. But this is not the only way to bake sourdough bread. In fact, a pretty decent loaf of sourdough bread can be made WITHOUT having the skill of handling wet dough AT ALL.