Sharpening the Saw

I’ve been deepening my Maker practice over the last year or so. I’m working with physical things, making electronics happen, doing art and making things out of metal. Loosely this could be defined as art. It’s more of a multi-disciplinary exploration of building things. I’m working out details of organizational systems for tools and materials. Also of time effort and learning. My background is in Electrical Engineering, so I’m no stranger to lab work and dealing with atoms so to speak. My focus became on software however and some of the corporeal elements of my work faded to the background with the exception of things like mechanical keyboards, displays and ergonomic chairs.

My new focus on building things has exposed me to different welding processes, cutting and bending techniques and generally dealing with unwieldy physical operations. I’m always struggling with organization and process since I’m a consummate multi-hyphenate kind of person so adding so many new tools to the mix started to upset the apple cart a bit. I went back and forth on all sorts of ideas to organize my shop space and make myself more efficient. I watched so many YouTube videos on shop organization and silently wondered if some of these people actually benefit from their ultra organization. Adam Savage at least admits that he just goes one step at a time and experiments and things blow up and he backtracks and reorganizes all the time. I’m somewhere on that spectrum as well but I think that Adam is kind of an outlier in the sheer breadth and volume of stuff that is in his orbit.

Where does that leave me? I’m doing the hard work of parting with things that don’t serve me and raising the bar on what I consider essential tools and materials. In the past I would buy a lot of cheap tools and try to always have things on hand. I’m starting to peel that back a little bit and get fewer higher-quality tools. It’s a long road to figure out what works for you and I think I’m finally starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. There is no one philosophy that works in all situations. I’m starting to realize this. Some shops are very opinionated in their organizational strategy and this most often reflects the sensibilities of the person running the show. Some shop people are completely OCD about every small thing being in place and cleaning everything up every time. I laud these efforts but I feel that it takes a certain personality type to make this work without feeling shame and guilt.

One thing I learned from Adam was the principle of first-order retrieval. Some things just need to be literally “at hand”. Meaning for me, some things need to be within reach while I’m sitting at the workstation I use for a particular task. It’s worth buying a second tool to put in a specific place so that it’s at hand immediately. First order retrieval means not having to move anything out of the way or open a drawer or pull out a bin to access the tool. Drawers are kind of drawing a fine line, I could think of a very neatly organized tool chest as first-order adjacent, but still not quite the same as grabbing it off of a tool caddy on the bench or on the wall. Speaking of bench tools, I’m torn on whether to normalize keeping tools of any sort on a work surface. It’s tempting but I think that I’m going to explore a rule that means the work surface should normally be completely open. I have my benches on wheels so I can roll them around (not that I do very often) but things like power strips and cables, monitors keyboards and mice. They all need to be corralled so that the table can actually move from the wall without one hundred things falling over or a cord brushing by and knocking everything over.

Not everything needs to be first-order retrievable. Part of the work here is to identify the 80/20 of keeping flow state. It’s impossible to keep everything at hand. The goal is to keep a work flow that maintains flow state as much as possible with some compromises. Some theories here include separate workstations for different activities and workstations devoted to specific projects. Other questions include how many active projects are optimal. I think it’s more than one. Here we get into philosophical differences in how different Makers operate. Some are focused single-project finishers while others need to have several things on the burner at once. I’m in the second category but it can get out of hand. I think there is an optimal number of active projects (I haven’t figured out that number yet though – it may take me my entire lifetime). One approach to doing projects is to order all materials you think you need up front and batch the whole project. Unless I have done the exact thing before it’s almost impossible to do. There are always some things that aren’t considered up front due to oversight or lack of knowledge. My approach here is to usually just try to get to the next step, which involves some slack time generally as I figure things out step by step. Since there is a kind of slow roll to some of these projects it makes sense to interleave things and work on several things at once. Part of this is budget. I think if I devoted more resources I would be able to over-order and just accept the fact that I will have a ton of things at the end of the project that I didn’t end up needing. This is another 80/20 situation where there’s probably an ideal mix of aggressive planning and sourcing at the beginning of a project or in a middle stage that can accelerate things without the budget getting out of hand.

A major organizational shift for me happened when I got a second workspace at my shop. I have two 20′ shipping containers side-by-side where I do my work. The first container I occupied for several years before getting the second. The second container started out as a place to build guitars and do non-metal work. The first container, or “dirty” container remained for metal and heavier work. This basic scheme hasn’t changed much and turned out to be a pretty good method of keeping things from getting totally fouled up. I run into the situation all the time where there is a tote of random stuff from a project that gets all tangled up with electronic bits, wires, tools, a sledgehammer and a giant piece of steel somehow all in the same container. There will be a tube of glue or something that gets under the hammer and leaks all over and the wire will be tangled around everything else in there. Physical organization needs to take into account size and fragility and general tangly-ness of a thing in addition to it’s type of use and which project it goes with.

Speaking of going with projects, there’s also the issue of keeping tools with project materials. At first this seemed like a revelation. Having a soldering iron along with my electronics project made it easy to pull that project out and work on it. Over time though, I started to lose track of my tools and now I had to go through a bunch of project bins to find things. This can probably work with some discipline but now I’m more inclined to “kit” tools into functional groups and pull the whole kit into a project and put it back when the project is shelved.

Kind of jumping around here, working on multiple projects means you need a way to stop and start work. This is a logical and also a physical concern. Many times I can’t remember where I left off and it’s hard to pick back up again. What was I thinking? What’s the next step? Do I have all the materials? It’s also a bad habit of mine to have multiple projects out on my workspace. Ideally I would only have a single active project out at a time on any individual workspace. It’s nice to be able to break a long welding project up over a few days by leaving it on the welding table, but if I need to weld something else in the meantime it makes things a little difficult. One solution is to make projects easier to suspend. By allocating most of it to bins or temporary storage. I still don’t have a good technique for this but I’m thinking that part of it could be calling projects finished more often. Once something gets to a certain stage of completion sometimes it makes sense to wrap it up and if I want to “continue” that project it’s really a new project that’s related to the learnings of the first project. I end up with some infinite projects that just keep going because I get new ideas or I keep moving the goalposts.

Showing progress is essential both for mental well-being as well as communication with people that might be following your work. It’s difficult to post something incomplete to instagram because you know there will be so many obvious comments but I think the benefit outwights the drawbacks. I still haven’t mastered the art of reading the comments. I think you just have to remember that comments are about the commenter not about you.

One resolution I have for this year is to not ignore friction but also not to focus entirely on optimization. I’m not good at finding this balance. It’s the classic idea where you want to write more so you find the perfect editor or the perfect blog platform, or maybe you should write your own, oh and it should be hosted on AWS because I’ve been meaning to brush up my skills there. These things need limits. They don’t have to be absolute. Just sharpen the saw a bit. Perfectionism is a killer. The key is to make durable progress. This is a thing that I’ve been terrible at over the last year. It’s been a kind of race to get things done and show progress but at the end I’m buried in a pile of tools and notes and half finished drawings. Slowing down to go fast comes to mind. It’s overall better to have a change that lasts and can be built on rather than a large change that largely gets undone or forgotten about and not leveraged moving forward. The law of compounding effort comes to mind. Getting 1% better in steps building on the previous work is like compounding interest. It’s hard to remember that when you are in the trenches of a project.