Originally Posted by NoRacer

What I do is put my bike in my trainer, then spin through the gears while in the big chain ring to check how smoothly they change. If it seems that it takes too long to go up a cog or down a cog during any of the gear changes, I'll turn the barrel adjuster, a little bit, in the appropriate direction, then check the correction. My goal is to make the gear changes just as smooth in either direction.