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[ledgekindred]

Also don't worry about bedrooms.  Make a dorm with a dozen or so beds in it and everyone will be fine for years to go. Even with 100 dwarves it will still be not often that more than a dozen or so to want to be asleep at the same time. I generally don't bother building bedrooms until much much later, like when I have 50+ dwarves and enough spare labor to run around mining out useless rooms.   About the only rooms I ever really care about having at first is a dorm, decent dining room to give dwarves happy thoughts while they eat, an office for my manager/bookkeeper and the essential workshops and storage. 

After the first migrant wave, I start specializing my dwarves into single-taskers. I give myself one or two extra miners, a couple engravers to make everything look nice, a couple dedicated cooks (better-quality food and drinks make dwarves happy) and farmers (for faster planting that produces more crops, so I can brew more booze to make all those slackers happy) and everyone else becomes haulers.  Engrave the dorm and put a few statues in it, do the same with the dining room, and all your dwarves will be happy for sleeping in a legendary dorm and eating great meals and high quality booze in a legendary dining room. 

After the first couple of goblin ambushes and I have enough goblinite to start giving dwarves halfway decent gear, all those slackers get drafted.  80 half-assed geared and trained dwarves may be cannon fodder, but they are still 80 dwarves armed with pointy sticks with which they more or less know how to poke things and can break up a mid-sized siege.  Then the bright side is now you have fewer dwarves to micromanage, more goblinite for caravans than you know what to do with and the ones who survived are now more experienced fighters who can hopefully teach the next bunch of slackers how to be real cannon fodder soldiers for the next siege!

It sounds like you are stressing way too much about micromanaging everyone.  Get the essential dwarves specialized, make sure incoming migrants don't do those jobs and dorf everything up with their cruddy Dabbling skills (please excuse me, Legendary Mason, let me make these statues to go into nobles' rooms; I made a pretty nice ashtray in shop class so I'm a Mason too!), and let everyone else move barrels of booze and rocks and stand around slacking.

[Hyndis]

I have 180 adult dwarves, and still don't have enough haulers. 

Those megaprojects aren't going to build themselves! Haul faster! 

[lanceleoghauni]

I find the easiest way to handle this is to set engraving to On on every single one of them, and have them smoothing until the miners can get the rooms done, saves effort on your 7's part, and keeps them occupied, throwing them into farming isn't a bad idea either, though it may hurt your yield. alternatively you can crank out a ton of picks and just set a bunch of them to mining. Make sure to use wide corridors though, you don't want your good miners to get choked out by the dabbling ones.

[jplur]

I throw them into squads, any other idlers make charcoal and smelt metal.

You can also try pausing the game more often while you designate new areas.  It shouldn't be hard to dig out and furnish 100 bedrooms in the first couple of years (if you've got two miners from the start).

[magicwalker]

Dwarf Therapist

Careful planning

Large military

Lots of haulers

[albinocaveslug]

Keep in mind that certain skills level up faster than others, notably engraving, mining, plant gathering and if you do multilevel platform work like I often do, extra masons and mechanics are pretty spiffy. Just control the workshops so your high skill dwarves make the needed items like floodgates, mechanisms and the like. Even up to near 200 dwarves I rarely have many idlers.

[Psieye]

I never really understood this type of concern over an early population boom. Either you're casual and you let those 40 dwarves live in communal dormitories and share a communal dining hall with just 4 tables and chairs, or you're OCD and you've tailored everyone's jobs according to their personalities, preferences and stats. If casual, you don't care that they're idling half the time or you put them into "mook"/"drone" categories where members are entirely interchangeable and expendable. If OCD, you've planned a mini project and a work plan tailored for every single dwarf and thus your fort will have a vibrant and FPS-killing industry.

Sure, there are plenty of cases where being in the middle ground between two extreme examples (actually, the 'casual' example isn't extreme) is wise. This isn't one of them: sounds like you just need to let go and come over to the casual side of managing your dwarves. Keep your specialists, but don't be afraid of having lots of generalists around living in crap conditions until you get your fort nicely carved out in later years.

[Hyndis]

Yup, that is what I do. I have the elites. Specialists who do no hauling. And then I have 100+ generalists who do all of the hauling, gruntwork, and spearcatching.

Generalists are interchangeable and entirely expendable. I lose one? Okay, just grab another one and fill up that squad again! The new guy picks up the dead guy's gear.

[Cotes]

You do know that you can lower the max population in the init file, right?

And more importantly, you know that you can slaughter your immigrants with little consequence?

When I embark on a volcano, the first thing I do is build a retracting bridge over it...

[Ten_Tacles]

I hated it too, to have too much dwarves, cause I love micromanaging but hate it when it starts to be too much work.
So my pop cap is at 20 

[Avaline]

One additional thing to add to the suggestions is this: the game tends to want to throw those two first waves at you.  The good thing for you is that after those two, it's heavily based on how well you buy out the merchants and have overall wealth.  If you move at a slow, careful pace like it sounds like you do, then you won't see much immigration after those first two waves, so you can plan accordingly.  As such, you can plan on about 30-40 dwarves early on and stick to that for a good while. 

Also Therapist can help you with 'excess' dwarves.  You can set up a custom profession with a preset list of jobs and just label those extra dwarves that.  Myself, I have two: Military, and Nothing.  Military are those who are or plan to become a part of the military while Nothing are for dwarves who I don't need at the moment or can't decide on. 

Also I use nicknames.  When I get a Master Milker and want them to be a woodcutter, I'll nickname them "Woodcutter trainee".  That way, I know that their current 'title' is temporary'.  I'll make use of prior skills, of course, but if I want a miner then Urist McLegendaryWeaponSmith is going to pick up a #(#% pick and mine, nevermind McUselessSkill.


beyond that, the suggestions of changing the max number of dwarves as you want less/more works well, and there's nothing you can't solve with the application of magma.

[Hyndis]

I also use custom professions with DT.

Stoneworkers --- mining, masonry, detailing, architecture
Woodworkers --- woodcutting, bowmaking, carpentry
Jeweler --- gem cutting and gem setting
Forge Lord --- armorsmith, weaponsmith, blacksmith, metalcrafter
Merchant --- weaving, bonecrafting, leathercrafting, glassmaking, stonecrafting, woodcrafting
Scientist --- all healthcare skills, mechanics, siege engineer, siege operator, pump operator
Fisherdwarf --- all fishing skills
Commoner --- hauling, furnace operating, farming skills

Hauling is disabled for everyone else. Commoners make up 90% of the fortress. For everyone else there are generally only a few dwarves doing that labor. Commoners also become soldiers.

[MiniMacker]

Hurm. I wish there was a way to put them into 'groups' in DT.

I'll give you a quick example.

Urist McGeneric
Urist McGeneric
Urist McGeneric
 -Group 1
  Urist McMason
  Urist McMason
  Urist McCarpenter

Urist McGeneric
Urist McGeneric
 -Group 2
  Urist McMiner
  Urist McMiner

Urist McGeneric
Urist McGeneric



And so on. Too bad chmod is abandoning DT...


Edit : I guess you could do it with having alphabetical nicknames. Like AUrist McMason, which would put him at the top.

[NewsMuffin]

I can hardly wait for migrants. My starting seven dwarves never have any skills, so progress is usually slow until the second or third wave.
Dwarves don't need individual rooms, just a dorm inside the dining hall. That's how I do it.

[AngleWyrm]

Here's an idea: Use the military approach to organizing a company. Break it down into smaller chunks. You could start a large farm and assign out of a projected 200 dwarves. Maybe the food industry will be assigned 1/10 of all dwarves -- 20 total. They would be the cooks, threshers, planters, brewers and gatherers. Of those professions, maybe 50% could be farmers, for a total of ten farmers.

using the breakdown approach, it then becomes possible to fill 200 job openings.