Organizing Your Thinking Around Organizing and Making Your Tools More Efficient @donttrythis

In this Tested video, Adam Savage talks about expanding your approach to organization to include your thinking around organization.

As part of this, he brings up something he’s shared before: When considering where to store a tool, go with the first place that pops into your head.

The project in this video is a simple one: painting his mill wrench so that he knows at a glance which is the proper orientation for tightening. As he points out, orienting it the wrong way and then flipping it around is only a few seconds of lost time, but it’s a mini frustration that can take you out of the flow.

He doesn’t mention this, but what I find most buzz-killing is a number of these mini hassles that add up and really frustrate a build experience. I frequently find myself searching for tools I didn’t put back where they belong, working with tools that need to be sharpened, oiled, or otherwise maintained, finding myself out of a needed material or supply, and similar. These can all compound and lead to frustration.

As he does point out, you cannot alleviate every type of shop frustration, but you can minimize them by solving the ones that are addressable, as he does with this little project.

In deciding how to mark the wrench for identification, he applies his “first thing you think of” rule. When wondering where to mark the tool and with what, his first thought was: Red paint on the tightening side. So that’s what he does.