What is the best way to tell if your dough is proven ready for baking?

I do the gentle poke test, when the dough comes back slowy it is fine.

For my dough * Sourdough bread * 2-21/2 hours is perfect.

It depends of course of the warmth of your kitchen, how active your starter is...

The very best way is to get a very small straight sided clear container  ( something a little wider than a test tube would be ideal )  spray it with nonstick spray.  When you are ready to start proofing, pinch off a little dough and put it in the test container and use  a rubber band or mark on the side to indicate the level, and then place it next to where the dough is proofing.  If the recipe calls for the dough to double in volume, you can see it in the test container pretty easily.   I have not been able to master the poke test, and even if I could, it only tells you as you test it by poking -  using a test container you can see exactly where you are in terms of proofing.   I think if you bake the same recipe over and over, the poke test would be more helpful, but since I am baking a variety of things, and using different flours, it is not ideal for me.

If I am doing a final rise on the kitchen counter (instead of taking a dough straight from fridge to oven) I usually let it sit covered for an hour before doing the poke test, which I am still uncertain of my interpretation of the results. Most of the time an hour is sufficient. I never look at whether the dough has doubled or whatever because I just can't tell whether a dough has expanded substantially or by the recommended volume multiple. That test tube test sounds good.

So I poke and pray, which works out well. Not sure if my desperate prayer makes the difference. I don't think the prayer before a football game works and my pre-bake prayer most likely falls into the same category (though at the least my bread feeds people; not sure what football accomplishes).

Actually,  I just found the perfect container.  Find someone who wears contact lenses and uses the Aosept cleaner.  The cleaner works with a retainer that holds the lens suspended in a very narrow plastic container.  Users get new containers pretty regularly, so it should be no problem getting one or two used containers.  I rinse them out, and spray them with a nonstick spray before I put the sample in it.  Since the sample gets thrown away, the fact that there was a contact lens cleaning solution is no problem.

I haven't baked many varieties of bread, but for the most part, I don't seem to recall any formulas that suggest that the dough is supposed to double in size after the bulk ferment. The doubling or tripling I have seen has always been with reference to the bulk ferment.  And for that, you can either use a narrow container as suggested, or bulk ferment in a cambro container that has measured markers from from 1-6 liters (or .5 to 6 liters) or whatever, and just flatten the dough in the container, see where it comes up to and see where it needs to go.  (I then do a a stretch and fold so it is no longer flat, but it eventually will expand and fill the container so I can tell when it is double or triple from the original mixing).

dough has proofed perfectly for baking for each recipe at various tomes of the year is the hardest thing to judge, and do,  in bread baking.  For breads with a lot of whole grains you want to be 85% proof and for white breads 90%.  I like my 50% whole grain breads to be at 87.39% in the summer and 88.22% in the winter:-)  This why I have a German Bread Baking Apprentice 2nd Class in the kitchen at ll times when the dough is proofing.