Well, when bikes were limited to 5 speed rear clusters and 2 chain rings up front, people went through all sorts of esoteric combinations to maximize the number and effectiveness of their gears. But now with most bikes having 9 speed rear clusters, knowing the exact sequence of gears is really not all that necessary. What I do on a triple or double (chain rings the ones up front), is to ride pretty much in one ring and make my shifts on the rear cluster. Here in FL, I stay pretty much in the big ring, avoiding the big ring big cog combination. When I start to bog down, I shift to the small ring. The main thing is to know when to shift from one ring to the other and not worry about it. Of course, if you want to maximize your gears, there is nothing stopping you from getting anaylitical and figuring out your gear inches. I used to type out the gear inches of each gear and display them veritically in two columns (small ring on the right column, big ring on the left). I taped that to my stem so I could know exactly which gear came next in the sequence. I have not done that since clusters went from 7 gears.