Mar 19, 2020

Sparking Joy in Shop Organization

When I am stressed out and need a moment, I can be found in a safe-space of noise-canceling headphones sweeping the shop.

Well, things are a little bezar in the world right now and I need to put that energy into doing something more productive than sweeping. You know, a little organizing, or Kaizen-ing if you Lean, Tidying Up if you Kondo.

I have the perfect project - let's distract ourselves with this wire rack of shame.

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It's been with me since the days of the garage and I'm more than over it. It was a great inexpensive way to store a bunch of stuff but now it's acting like a bad cubicle wall in the most important work area around our CNC.

The wire rack has persisted for so long because it seemed to need a perfected organization system. Every time it's come up, one of us will inevitably say, "it holds so much stuff," which is a bad way of saying, "this problem seems impossible."

Chris and I made this rough but surprisingly effective tool divider in about 10 minutes back in the last shop. It is a great example of just getting something made that’s the first version - getting past that "it has to be perfect" mindset and we've found much more utility in this than not having it at all.

So what are we going to do about it?

The current divider holds the answer - instead of waiting for a perfect solution, I need to just get something made. Try not to overthink it and get this wire rack out of here.

I've learned that I need to break down big problems into smaller tasks. So, we know we want to move the tools over to the french cleat wall. The big perk there is anything can be rearranged.

We're going to use the same concept as the previous divider, except this time we'll make it modular.