The moment you spend more time tinkering tools instead of doing work, you obviously lost control. But even that’s too much. I believe you shouldn’t be spending 10% of your daily work time on tinkering tools. That’s an hour out of an 8h working day.
> Sharp tools mean that for the 7 remaining hours I get 7 units of work done. Dull tools get me 3 units of work done.
That's not how it works. You get the same amount of work done, but with less precision, a less good finish and more errors (and more accidents). Because you need more power to force the dull blade (or whatever) into/through the wood (or whatever).
Not necessarily. I work with a lot of legacy spaghetti code with many layers of unnecessary abstractions which requires navigating through the code a _lot_. I have set up my IDE and toolset to make it easy and fast to navigate through the mess. Whereas some of my coworkers haven’t and getting to the same result takes much longer. This is just one way that tools can actually speed up your work to get more done.
I’ve done a fair amount of car work. The analogy makes sense for me when I think about workspace habits. There was a time where I’d grab a wrench and then leave it wherever when I was done turning that one bolt. It might have been on the ground next to my right hand, on my belly, or on the bumper.
That changed after I spent far too many frustrating moments looking for a 12 mm wrench and losing my train of thought to backtrack my steps.
I hit a stride when I learned to organize my tools and keep them organized between tasks. It’s still obvious to me now because I have friends who don’t work this way, and I feel overwhelmed when I go into their garage or kitchen and all work surfaces are covered in tools, knives, unopened boxes, etc. I need to actively expand mental energy to ignore those things.
