Stop Guessing What Your Jobs Actually Make

Day 7: Week 1 Recap: You Already Leveled Up

If you’ve been following along this week, here’s what you’ve done:

• Day 1: Added 10 Duplicate Zone items and 3 locations
• Day 2: Applied the One Home Rule: every item, one home
• Day 3: Learned the 2-minute readiness check
• Day 4: Started tracking material replacement costs
• Day 5: Wrote your first failure note
• Day 6: Named 5 locations in your shop

That’s it. No massive overhaul. No weekend-long reorganization. Just small, daily improvements that compound.

Day 6: Label Locations, Not Items

Labeling every item becomes homework. Nobody keeps up with it.

I’ve seen workshops where someone spent a weekend labeling every drawer, every bin, every shelf — and within a month it was all outdated. Items moved. New tools arrived. Labels peeled off. The system collapsed under its own weight.

Day 5: Failure Notes: Turn Downtime Into Data

If a tool fails repeatedly, it’s expensive, even if it was cheap to buy.

That $15 set of drill bits that dulls every other use? The sandpaper that clogs in 5 minutes? The clamp that slips? Each failure costs you time, material, and momentum. But without data, you just keep buying the same stuff. In fact, I’m kinda doing this with a set of router bits. I got 100+ bits (I think). It seemed like such a good deal, but I’ve used like 6 of these bits, one or two times each, and they are dull and I’m getting tear out.