5 Tips to Improve Shop Efficiency

We have been full time woodworkers and content creators for about 5 years now (CRAZY) and we have learned what truly works to have shop efficiency. In this post, we will be sharing our top 5 tips to improve and maximize your shop time!

Get Organized

I know we tend to say this a lot, but it’s so true! Getting and keeping your shop organized is a game-changer. This means having a home for everything in your shop, so it has a place to get put back and so you know where things are throughout all the drawers and workbenches. This doesn’t mean you have a “The Home Edit” worthy of a shop, but just so drills have a spot to go and bits have a spot to go at the end of the day. If you say our shop tour, you know we have a few catch-all drawers around, but we still know what is in them, they just aren’t pretty. You can watch the shop tour here!

Clean Daily

This brings us to the next time, clean daily. Now, don’t worry about sweeping and wiping down all the tables every day, we don’t even do that! This means take the time maybe in the morning to pick up tools and things that go messy the day before. We typically clean up at the end of the day so we can walk in the next morning to a fresh start. Dylan sometimes likes to come in early in the morning to clean when he’s not super pumped about working on a certain project so he can get moving in the shop while also start to think about the day. Whichever way works for you!

Take Time for Lunch

I can’t tell you how many times we have skipped lunch and are absolutely starving by 3:00 pm. After we shove food down, we get lazy and just don’t want to move again for the rest of the day. If we had just taken the 30 minutes to stop and eat lunch, we would have been way more productive. Lately, we have made this a priority because we just have to get stuff done. Taking a small break will allow your brain to rest and your body to get food and reenergize. Don’t just take a lunch break. Take 5-minute break throughout the day so you can grab water and keep a good mindset about all the work you are doing. A good mindset equals fewer mistakes.

Software and Apps

We use a handful of productivity apps and shop programs to keep the smoothness going. We first use SketchUp and their companion app Layout to create our projects and project plans. This is really handy to have because we like to prepare everything as much as we can before we even get started in the shop so we mess up fewer times. We also will know what materials are needed and how much, so we can cross going to get materials off the list as soon as possible.

Second app is called Todoist. This is a task-building app where we create a To-Do list that repeats itself every day. That way we have a morning routine that we can check off. A morning routine like checking emails maybe some marketing if you have a business could help out a ton so you aren’t thinking about all the things you need to do later throughout the day.

Next one is Notion. This has been a saving grace for the two of us to work together. We can put tasks down for ourselves or for each other and have those delegated, so we know who is doing what. Before this, we were texting tasks and then they would get lost or forgotten. Not a good system for us. In Notion, you can build out exactly what you want or need. We have tasks, project ideas, every project we have ever done in there, and links that we need to refer to often. This is the best product management tool we’ve used.

Last one is Be Focused. This is a timer app that you can set a specific amount of time to sit down and work. We work in 35-minute sessions when we are on the computer and then you get a 5-minute break between each session. You can totally just use a timer on your phone or a legit alarm. This method is great because you know that you have to work for 35 minutes and then you get a break. We do a lot better when we set little goals for ourselves to get a bigger goal completed. When we are in the shop, we work for about an hour and a half to 2 hours and then get a 15-minute break. This really helps with time management!

Get the Right Tool for the Job

This by no means is encouraging you to go into debt or make a poor financial decision. This means assessing what you think would be a good investment for the jobs that you do to drastically improve the efficiency in your shop. Something as simple as a new table saw will make your quality of building skyrocket. Just think about where should you put your money that you make off of woodworking back into the business, or hobby. This will all translate to increasing your income because you’ll be able to complete a job much faster and have it built better than before.

In our shop, we have the Inventables X-Carve that acts as a third person in the shop. While this thing runs, we are doing other things that we can on a project. The increased efficiency, reliability, and accuracy can take your work to another level. We’ve used the X-Carve for over 2 years probably over 500 hours on the machine and the only maintenance we’ve done was a broken belt after moving it. We ran this for 15 hours a day for 2 weeks when we did the biggest project of our career and actually made our deadline. I honestly don’t think we could have made that deadline without it and we had no issues with this machine running for so long. Not to mention it’s so affordable for a CNC! You can check out the CNC we have here!