Greg - what type of flour and yeast are you using? Is your dough pretty dry? I think you may need to increase your hydration a bit. I would recommend you try a this. First, add your water to your mixing bowl. If you are making your dough and using it in the same day, use room temp water, not cold. Add 75% of your flour to the water while mixing. Once it starts coming together let it sit for at least 20 minutes. (Up to a few hours) This is an autolzye. After the autolyze, add your yeast, sugar, and salt in that order. If you want to add some olive oil, you can add it to the water in the very beginning. Add in the balance of the flour until the dough is a little wet and a little sticky, but not too hard to handle. Also, if you are using ADY instead of IDY, you can take some of the initial water to proof it and add it in after the autolzye. You don't need to proof IDY separately. From there, you can follow your normal process of rising and portioning.
If you really want to change things up, get yourself a decent, cheap digital scale. (about $25) Once you start weighing your ingredients you can get very repeatable results and work in bakers percentages instead of volume. Different flours absorb water at different rates and have different densities. Plus, you can really control your hydration percentage this way. In addition, you can mess around with long, cold ferments in the fridge, although you'd have to decrease the amount of yeast your using dramatically. You can make your dough ahead of time, and let it bulk rise in the fridge for 1 - 4 days. The portion out the balls and let them rise to room temp the day you use them, shape, dress & bake.
In Bakers percentages your recipe would look something like this. (Flour is always 100%, if you're using 100 grams of flour, you would multiply the percentages below by the number of grams of flour or 100 in this example)
Flour - 100%
Water - 63%
Yeast - 2% (Which is a lot, my recipe are around .50%-.60%)
Salt - 1%
Sugar - 2% (If you using this to feed your yeast, you don't need it)
But for now, add somemore water and follow the steps above. Report back!
AND! When your kneading, I assume by hand, lay the dough on the counter and with the heel of your hand press the dough away from you. Once it flattens out, fold a 1/3 flap from the top towards you, then fold the 1/3 flap from the bottom away from you and the fold the left and right sides in. Turn seem side down, and rotate 90*. repeat!
