Discussing which jobs will be replaced around the campfire

Last fall, I went camping with several other families from my neighborhood. As we sat around the fire the conversation turned from Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI to what the AI revolution will mean for us more generally. We had lawyers, professors, therapists, architects, designers, teachers and parents in the conversation. While there was a lot of speculation about what humanity may lose in the AI revolution, one concern has stuck with me.

One professor of therapy insisted that there was one thing an AI model could never replace. Even though a large language model like ChatGPT could be trained to respond like a therapist, adhering to best practices and responding with empathic sounding words, an essential part of the healing that takes place between therapist and client is the experience the client has of being seen, their story being known and understood by another person. No matter how good the AI is, it cannot provide this.

An essential part of the healing that takes place between a therapist and client is the experience the client has of being seen, their story being known and understood by another person.

Humans evolved for connection

I think this is a critical observation. Human beings are wired for interpersonal connection. We evolved and succeeded in becoming the most powerful species on the planet by cooperating in groups. We devote a tremendous amount of brain power to simulating what other people around us are thinking so we can be better family members, colleagues and teammates. And yet this aspect of human minds also tends to make us attribute agency to things that are not in fact agents. Neuroscientist, Justin Barrett, in his book, Born Believers, explains the evolutionary advantage to the person who attributes the rustling they hear in the bushes to the lion waiting to pounce instead of simply assuming it’s the wind –and being wrong.

And we know from years of research that humans are likely to attribute agency and personhood to software especially when interacting with them via verbal exchanges in text.  A good deal of Chat GPT’s attractiveness as a product can be attributed to its effectiveness at responding like a person would by using large samples of human responses as its source material.

It’s obviously unethical to try to create experiences that deceive users into believing a person is interacting with them when in fact there is only software. But is it possible that users informed that they are in fact talking to software only, could still experience the positive psychological impacts of feeling seen and known simply on the quality of the responses of the software, having been trained on how humans communicate those sentiments?

Can AI make people feel seen?

In my past work at Twin Health, as we experimented with large language models, we constantly kept in mind that at the core of our member’s trust in our product is trust in the people who care about them and are paying attention to their health in a way that, often, no one really had before. Our members’ trust in the program and in the behavior and medication changes we were asking them to make is based on their trust primarily in people, not primarily their trust in their Digital Twin or AI.

This doesn’t mean companies should shy away from using these tools especially where they can unburden our human care teams from tedious repetitive work or provide real-time decision support for people in ways that on human could afford to. But it means that one key metric we should keep our eye on is how seen, cared for and in relationship our users feel as we increase automation to enable the scale that unlocks new levels of care to match to the size of the problem of chronic diseases like diabetes.

A decade and a half into my practice designing products and software, some things keep coming up. I’ll keep up with them here.

1. Make the software explain itself

Ideally software should need no manual, instructions or training. Instead the meaning and actions available should be discoverable by the user and they should be able to play with and explore them to get a sense of what they do and how they work. Users feeling free to “play” with an app is a pre-requisite to feeling comfort in it and mastery of it.

2. No ornamentation without meaning

Colors, images, icons, and especially animation that don’t convey meaning are like noise. When mixed in with elements that do convey meaning, They present the user with a puzzle to solve that has no answer. They create a lingering sense that one is missing out on the joke.

3. Use self-explanatory labels

Avoid using jargon, company or domain specific labels. Instead aim for 5th grade vocabulary level terms whose dictionary definitions make sense of what they are describing in the software.

4. The software should show its model of the problem or the world to the user

Especially when AI or models are involved, the more that the software can visualize or make clear what data it is considering to make sense of the problem or the world, the more the user will be able to match their mental model to that of the software making their experience feel intuitive by minimizing surprises. Importantly, this also allows for critical thinking about whether the user knows something the model doesn’t. In many cases this improves the safety of using automation.

5. Teach the user what they need to know when they need to know it, not before

A basic principle of adult learning is the concept of just-in-time learning. This is not only an affordance to the limited time and attention our users have. It’s also about recognizing that users are motivated to take in new information when they see that information as relevant to solving a problem they have now. Just-in-time learning is stickier because users are ready to learn instead of seeing the education as an impediment to get over to accomplish their goal. Framing is important here.

6. Show me what’s important by how much of the screen it takes up

Visual hierarchy gives unconscious cues to the user on what’s important as they scan across the page. Important features can have more than one embodiment or entry point.

7. Only break UI conventions when you want to slow the user down and add friction

Only do this when safety or the experience requires it. Using conventions in UI elements increases users sense of familiarity with your software and their sense of it being “intuitive.” Read Daniel Kanneman’s _Thinking Fast and Slow_ for more detail on how to use the two thinking systems to create smooth intuitive experiences (system 1) and when to break that by adding friction to create a pause for conscious (system 2) evaluation.

8. Don’t fear the scroll

Especially on apps with dashboard or monitoring features, there’s a temptation to put everything on the screen at once. Screens want to scroll. As long as users feel confident they are on the right track of the information they are looking for they have no problem tapping or scrolling to get to it.

9. Touch targets should be as large as large as you can afford

Apple’s Human Interface guidelines suggest 44 pt as the smallest touch target designers should use. But bigger is better because it makes it easier for people to hit without intense focus, and improves accessibility. Just pay attention that it isn’t in conflict with #6.

Or, how remote work can trick you into feeling more stressed than you need to

There is no trash can or recycling bin in your computer, just different ways the system tags files. But the useful fiction of the recycle bin interface lets us know what to expect about files we put there even if it’s not literally true. In a similar way, we might think of emotions as a kind of software interface to what might otherwise be an overwhelming amount of sensory and analysis data. The work our emotions are doing is a kind of summary of sensory inputs, our perceptions about them, and their matching to prior experiences.

As useful as these emotion-interfaces are, it’s important to remember that they aren’t reality itself any more than the recycle bin icon is, and to keep a critical eye on what they have to tell us about reality.

New Job: new anxiety?

I recently started a new job. I was feeling some stress about it as I learned about my new teammates and worked to pick up projects mid-stream. In the early mornings when I would wake up, I would feel a familiar, burning acid stomach feeling. I’ve always felt anxiety, dread, and fear there in my stomach and my half-awake mind doesn’t have the benefit of all the things I know when fully awake.

One day, when trying to get back to sleep, I propped up on some pillows, elevating my torso. To my surprise, the sensation I had been reading as anxiety stopped immediately. I was having a sensory experience that my mind was reading and tagging as anxiety, but by changing my position, the sensory input stopped and the emotion quickly evaporated. Sometimes these interfaces, heuristics, and strategies we use to know what we are experiencing get it wrong or at least don’t get the whole picture.

Extended Senses; extended emotions

If emotions are a kind of interface to the overwhelming flow of sensory inputs and perceptual judgments our minds make of them, then it follows that our senses are some of the primary inputs for our emotions. This is interesting to note when considering the current discussions of AI. Everyone seems preoccupied with the question of their sentience but no one seems to talk about how whatever sensors we give them or they find a way to get will dramatically impact whatever analog they develop for emotions or consciousness. Another way to say this is that an octopus has a different consciousness than a mammal precisely because its bodily and sensory inputs are different.

We live at a time when we have dramatically extended our sensory inputs from people and objects in our immediate vicinity to a whole host of people and systems across the planet. I have joined three different remote companies over the last 5 years. Joining each one was not so much agreeing to be at a particular place at a particular time as much as it was agreeing to hook a set of notifications up to my consciousness and engage them with a certain level of throughput.

Each time I do this I notice a distinct uptick in my anxiety, stress, and sense of overwhelm– at least until I gain enough institutional knowledge to filter the signal from the noise. Which is precisely a process that our brains do with new sensory inputs as well. At first, a new environment can feel too noisy, too bright, or smells too intense or distracting. But quickly most people’s brains filter out sensory inputs that are consistent and non-threatening. That said, difficulty doing this characterizes much neurodivergent sensory experience. Not everyone’s brains do this for them automatically.

Alarms, Alerts, and Notifications As Senses

I’ve long been scrupulous as a designer and a user about when and how I let systems interrupt my attention. I believe our attention is our most precious and scarce asset. And, once diverted, getting my attention back focused where I want it is costly. Further, these interruptions are most often un-designed or underdesigned and at worst, exploitative. Why would I invite some random app and the design and product teams behind it to hijack my attention multiple times a day?

After living with near-constant awareness of my daughter’s blood glucose and diabetes health through continuous glucose monitoring, I can tell you that I have come to feel like an additional sense. This makes a lot of sense given the work of neuroscientist, David Eagleman, on sensory augmentation and substitution.

The internet allows us to tie new senses into our minds. Is it any wonder that they are contributing to new and sometimes negative emotional outcomes?

I’ve written elsewhere about the ways that I enjoy feeling my senses extended by technology. Knowing that my daughter’s glucose is in a safe range while she and my wife are asleep sleep halfway around the world while I travel is invaluable. I love being surprised by my phone’s voice assistant reading texts from family and friends to me that arrive while I’m out on a morning walk and feeling closer to them than ever as their thoughts seem to unfold in my mind as read aloud by my voice assistant in my Bluetooth earbuds.

What gives me pause is the need to bring that same critical eye to the emotional interfaces my mind brings to these new sensory inputs. If my brain can misread signals from my stomach as anxiety, it’s probably going to misread signals from my work Slack too and roll them up into some kind of emotional experience that may or may not be a real picture of reality.

As a member of the community of design practitioners, I think we have a lot to learn from this metaphor of notifications as extended senses. How might we design notifications that don’t demand full attention hijack from our user with adrenaline-infused audio alerts, but instead follow how our senses work with more subtle dial-ups and dial-downs of attention through more senses than the visual and the auditory? I’ve begun to explore this a bit in my bgAWARE project but there’s a lot more work to be done to move away from the current all-or-nothing paradigm that’s fracturing our attention constantly.

So? What helps?

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend spending some time auditing and managing which apps and input streams are allowed to interrupt you and when. This is arguably one of the most crucial mental health interventions you can make. Slack has robust controls over when it’s allowed to ask for your attention. iOS and Android have rolled out new tools to silence, group and delay notifications. These are worth learning about and using.

As far as positive practices, the most helpful ones I’ve found for bringing this critical eye to these emotional experiences are, writing, meditation, and emotion logging.

Writing

Making time for personal writing, journaling and reflection often results in new perspectives and re-frames on emotions that at first seem very reliably tagged. Kevin Kelly says he writes in order to know what he thinks. This description of making time to write captures so much of what I find valuable in the practice. It gives me space to explore what I’ve been feeling and thinking in a way that I can’t do alone with my thoughts because I simply can’t sting enough of them together before they start falling out of my attention. I’ve been using the practice of morning pages: making time to sit down and write every day without agenda, without goal. I type and I don’t target a word count or a number of pages. I try to write for 20 minutes. I don’t always make time for it but I notice that when I do, I feel less anxious, more present, and more able to be the person I aspire to be to the people to whom I’m committed.

Meditation

Meditation practice builds the habit of an inner observer or executive function watching the river of thoughts and emotions roll by, driven by the current of sensory input. Meditation does this by cutting down on the signal input or limiting and focusing sensory attention.

Emotion Logging

Finally, I’ve been striving to learn and use more names for my emotions. The psychology literature is clear that the more and different kinds of emotions we learn to perceive and name in ourselves, the healthier we will be. And this makes intuitive sense given this metaphor of emotions as interfaces. We are literally giving our minds more and more nuanced interface elements with which to build emotional interfaces to summarize and understand our experience. I built an app called CharacterMe focused on helping teens understand and name their emotions. Lately, I’ve been loving the award-winning app, How We Feel, for support in taking time to attend to, name, and log my emotions.

What’s the point?

This is not an essay against Slack or email or notifications. Although I have critiques of how all 3 could work better with what we know about our senses, our attention and how they impact our emotions.

This is a call to:

1. Pay attention to what new senses we link to our consciousness

2. Remain curious and skeptical about the emotions that come along with them.

Our brains do a lot of work for us automatically and below the level of our conscious selves. But some of the emotions are as fictional as the recycle bin on your computer’s desktop. And I’ve found that my well-being is rewarded by being skeptical about these interfaces and checking my brain’s work on a regular basis.

Here are some of the things I am learning about technology design in general from my daughter’s journey into becoming a real-live cyborg.

1. INTERFACES MATTER MORE THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER SURFACE OF A DESIGN.

Where the hardware touches or penetrates your body is exponentially more important in its ability to enhance or ruin your experience than the parts that don’t. Infusion sets and their adhesives matter more than the form and industrial design of a pump. Think about how the quality of experience in smartphones went up when you were touching glass rather than plastic membranes.

2. THE MORE ELEMENTAL AND GEOMETRIC SIMPLICITY A DESIGN HAS THE LESS OBVIOUS PEOPLE CAN ASSUME ABOUT WHAT IT’S FOR.

The Libre sensor is a small white circle with a tiny bit of adhesive peeking out around the edges. It could be a nicotine patch. It could be a piercing spacer plug. It could be some biometric bitcoin wallet. Medtech has an aesthetic of rounded grey plastic that says “grey, safe, hospital railing.

You can see it replicated here in the CGM my daughter wears.

When things like the Libre or the Tandem t-slim pump that looks like the little brother of the first gen iPhone subvert that aesthetic they grant their users the ability to have them mistaken for something else and thus empower them to decide when they reveal their diabetes or not.

3. YOUR BODY DOESN’T WANT TO BE MODIFIED PERMANENTLY.

It will eventually encapsulate anything that penetrates the skin. The most successful technological adaptations, glasses, fillings, piercings, bone amplified hearing aids, find ways to avoid crossing that barrier or work within it because the body will fight you forever. This is part of why I think our largest organ of sensory input, skin, is underutilized in technology design. The best designs are reversible or better, work with the body’s natural tendencies and mechanics to make a composition together.

4. INTEROPERABILITY AND MODIFICATION ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.

I don’t risk violating intellectual property law when I tailor my pants to fit my legs or when I combine Uniqlo jeans with a J.Crew jacket. Just kidding. I can’t afford J. Crew. Similarly, I don’t hang to worry if the bluetooth headphones I buy at the airport because I forgot mine at home will work with my tablet. The standard means I can mix and match to meet my needs and they will work. And yet, when people with diabetes wanted to wear a continuous glucose monitor and have their insulin pumps slow down the insulin when they started to go low, they had to do a good bit of reverse engineering to make that work and continue to engage in a bit of cat and mouse with the manufacturers to do so. And we are talking about technology woven into our bodies.  At Tidepool.org, we believe that data created by a person’s body is owned by that person regardless of who made the hardware or software that captures it.

5. IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL, LEAVE IT BLANK.

I love the image of the first cyborg body Alita wears in the recent film, Alita: Battle Angel.  It was crafted lovingly by a father for his daughter who was paralyzed to move her brain into and walk again. French curves engraved into every corner speak of love expressed in craft. And yet you would be hard-pressed to find such bespoke hardware in the medtech world. But the skin of the omnipod insulin pump is a translucent white canvas for kids and adults to scrawl messages, paint fingernail polish onto, apply stickers or festive rainbow duct tape. It’s a disposable three-day pump; a digital syringe. Like the old plaster cast left blank for signatures or covered in colored tape, design can leave room for the people who take these pieces of technology into their bodies to express themselves.

They can even come to embody the support of the people who love them in the very physical manifestation of a disease imposing itself upon you. Leaving room for the user to make it their own can reverse of a device from a disruptive symbol of oppression into an expression of power and agency. Your brand is less important than this.

6. THERE ARE ALWAYS COSTS AND BENEFITS TO TAKING ANY NEW TECHNOLOGY INTO YOUR LIFE OR YOUR BODY.

And that calculus should be engaged in critically and with periods of evaluation before one becomes dependent. I wanted to learn how to treat my daughter with multiple daily injections and finger stick blood sugar checks before we learned an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor. Similarly, I wrote my own criteria of safety and quality of life improvement by which I would judge the success of the DIY artificial pancreas system we tried 6 months after diagnosis. Like the hospital lab that still uses a dot matrix printer because they can’t do without it one day and it still works pretty well, it’s easy to get technologies and processes embedded into our lives and then never ask ourselves if they are still worth it. Insulin pumps have existed for over 60 years but i’ve 75% of Americans with type 1 diabetes still use multiple daily injections. If you ask them why you get s wide variety of answers. Some still valid and others not as the technology advances. This is why the critical analysis needs to be ongoing. I’ve spoken to many people with type 1 who tried a continuous glucose monitor after 30-40 years of living without one to report that it had changed their lives for the better, though in many cases they were reticent to adjust their practice.

7. THE BEST TOOLS DON’T FORCE A PARTICULAR METHOD ONTO A USER, BUT INSTEAD ENABLE FLEXIBILITY, IMPROVISATION AND AGENCY IN THE USER’S PRACTICE.

I’m fond of hand tool woodworking, not because I’m a luddite but because I enjoy practices over purchases. Andy Crouch in his masterful essay, From Purchases to Practices, contrasts the inverse enjoyment curves that purchases and practices have. Purchases are most enjoyable before you have them. Afterward it’s all downhill. Practices, on the other hand, like sharpening a blade or woodworking in general aren’t very enjoyable in the beginning until one has put in the time to build skill, perceptions and judgement that come from experience. Then it starts to get fun. And the enjoyment can keep growing as one develops skill. I can’t say I enjoy diabetes nor have i met anyone else who does. But I can say it is a practice that involved the building of skill. I gravitated towards hand tools for the simple reason that I didn’t have much space. I reasoned that if the old masters could build all the furniture in the world with a small chest of tools then so could I. And that’s because almost every hand tool can be used in different ways. Some uses are more traditional than others but the further you get the more flexibility and improvisation you can find in ways of working. Some tools are highly specialized for one job. But the best tools are flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of ways by different users. They empower the cultivation of skill rather than forcing all users down the same few paths. And make no mistake, the users of the things you design can feel if you trust them with freedom to repurpose them to their own practice or if you have locked them out of the controls. At it’s best it is paternalism. At it’s worst, disrespect.

If technology is the stand-in for biology in the evolutionary process (once it becomes managed by conscious minds Kelly, 2011), then design is the stand-in for adaptation, and an iterative process of testing is the stand-in for selection.

This has an interesting parallel in the scientific method in that both processes involve creating a mental model of the observed environment, making a prediction based on that model and testing it by placing it in the environment as a means of refining the model.

In this way design can serve as a means of learning and iterating toward more accurate and functional models of reality which then serve to enable better design in a virtuous cycle.

After buying my first home I had a lot shelves I wanted to add to closets. Eventually I started designing and building furniture to fit particular spaces. Most importantly I had a small 6’x8′ back patio behind my townhouse where I could work. This might sound small, but it was a lot better than clamping things to the dining room table.

It’s been a few years since then. I’ve finished a few more projects and shared a lot of them in process on Instagram. More than a few friends have asked what tools they need to get started with woodworking so I decided to make it shareable.

What Tools Do You Really Need?

It can be tempting to buy power tools because they are, well, powerful. But the noise and air-blown sawdust can make them a bad fit for working inside apartment buildings or in shared spaces. On the other hand, a small kit of hand-tools are how most furniture has been made throughout the hundreds (thousands if you count back to Rome) of years of woodworking history. And for me, it’s a lot more relaxing using tools that can’t cut my hand off in a moment of inattention.

A lot of my decisions on which tools to buy and keep flow from living in the city, in a townhouse, without much indoor storage or room to work. That paired with some early influence from youtube woodworker / curmudgeon, Paul Sellers, means that I have bias for tools where the accuracy is in the hand of the person rather than embedded in the tool. Beyond that, there is a real practicality in a set of tools that can build all kinds of furniture (bookshelves, benches, cabinets, desks etc.) with a set of tools that can fit in a small tool-box.

I started seeking out estate sales and yard sales looking for hand tools and slowly began picking up and restoring old tools. With a very few exceptions, the tools I use every day I bought used and spent time getting back into shape.

The list below are the hand tools I would say are essential to start with. You can have them all for less than $100 total. Where used tools are a good option I’ll share a price range where I’ve seen and bought these tools.

Universal-Cut Japanese Pull-saw

My father-in-law who has been working wood his whole life, surprised me by recommending I buy a Japanese pull-saw. “These are NICE,” I remember him saying.

Unlike most western saws you’re used to seeing which cut on the push stroke, these cut on the pull. This also pulls the blade straight even when it is made up of very thin steel. This plus post-war manufacturing magic and heat-treating the tiny teeth after sharpening mean that these saws cut better than any saw you’ve ever used. My first blade stayed sharp a year and half of regular use.

The universal cut has teeth set up to work for cutting across the wood fibers as well as down them which is nice not to have to worry about when you are still learning to read the grain.

Caution: not all saws and blades are created equal. I’ve had nothing but good experience with the Z-Saw brand.

Buy New Here ~$25

Combination Square

This is your main tool for laying out cuts and joints. You can pick up cheap ones at the hardware store but they likely aren’t very precise.

Starrett is the industry standard but they are pricey (~$100) new. I use a 6 inch combination square for most of my work though occasionally I find a 12 inch useful. Products Engineering company makes very finely machined squares that can be had for much more affordable prices.

Buy Used: $5–15

Buy New Here: $15–25

Marking Knife

Literally any small knife you can keep sharp will do here. But the key to straight, sharp cuts with the saw is marking out your lines with a knife which makes a little groove for the saw-teeth to follow.

I’ve used pocket knives, little whittling / carving knives, really anything small and sharp you can control well in your hand.

I particularly like these one-beveled Japanese knives that are flat on one side so you can put the flat side against your square and slide it down. But, be careful, they are brittle, high-carbon steel, so drop it and you may damage the tip. A fun project is building a wooden scabbard for it.

Buy New Here: ~$20

F-Clamps

F- clamps are extremely powerful and easy to use. And they are easy to use to hold your work in place until you can build a workbench.

Bessey and Stanley are great brands to pick up used. But the budget Harbor Freight variety work just fine. Start with a pair of f-clamps at least a foot or two long.

Buy more when you’re building something that needs them.

Buy Used: $5–10

Buy New Here $11

Chisels

Chisels are easy to find used and to buy new. I pick up used ones with or without handles whenever I see them. I avoid big nicks or chips in the cutting edge because they’ll be work to get out. I started with a cheap Chinese made set with plastic handles from the hardware store: 1″, 3/4″, & 1/2″. They performed just fine as long as I kept them sharp.

Most of the time now I use a 3/4″ chisel I always keep extremely sharp, a 1/8″ chisel I use for getting into tight spaces or cutting grooves for the bottoms of boxes or small drawers, and occasionally the large 1.5″ chisel in the photo above for large subtractive shaping of stock for carvings (hence the two handed handle).

Chisels are the essence of woodworking: a sharp wedge that removes wood. The plane is just a chisel in a housing. There are a few types but you should start with “bench” chisels which have a beveled cutting edge and beveled sides. You’ll use these the most anyway.

You can hit it with any hammer you may have (smaller the better) or make your own chisel mallet or hammer.

Buy Used: $2–10

Buy New Here: $8

Hand Plane (#4)

First: it’s a plane or “hand plane.” “Planers” are powered versions of the hand held tool with a rotary cutter. “Power planers” are big rotary cutters with an in-feed that flatten out boards.

Record, Stanley, Dunlop, Bailey, Miller’s Falls; these are all fine brands you might find in various states of disrepair or rust at a yard sale. I’ve paid as little as $5 and as much as $30 for hand planes at yard and estate sales. Look for cracks in the cast iron body, especially around the opening on the bottom where it joins the sides and makes a weak spot. The bodies are cast iron and hard to repair if cracked. You can check how flat the bottom is against a ruler or your new combo square, but this can be flattened with sandpaper taped to glass or granite or something else very flat.

Look to see if any pieces are missing and if there are any big nicks or deep pits from rusting in the blade. Nicks are work to fix. Pits are hard. Though Hock Tools sells excellent replacement “irons” or blades.

Sadly it’s hard to find good quality planes new for under ~$100. Stanley’s Sweetheart line are quality. Wood River, Veritas and Lie-Nielson are top of the line reproductions of classic Stanley models.

But even the perfect out of the box Lie-Nielson will eventually dull and go out of tune and require sharpening, and set-up. So when you are starting, it’s best to get an old tool that needs some TLC for $15–20 and learn how to take it apart, clean it, put it back together and really get it to sing. There are lots of models but the #4 is generally regarded as the first and most indispensable plane for your kit.

More than any other tool I use, hand planes provide the most satisfaction to use because, like musical instruments, the more time you spend with them, the better results you get. As your skill grows you learn to read the grain better, hone sharper and you can get glassy smooth finishes and bright, sharp grain patterns from just a few strokes that you could never get from sanding all day long through a dozen grits. But beware: there is also heartache once you tear out a chunk of that glassy surface where the grain changes direction. Learning when and how to avoid doing this is a lifelong journey.

Buy Used: $10–30

Buy New Here: $80-$350

Sharpening Stones & a Leather Strop

The key to having fun with planes and chisels is keeping them sharp. There are a million opinions on this. I mostly follow Paul Sellers’ guidance on freehand sharpening though I haven’t invested in his high end DMT diamond plates. I started with cheap stones from Harbor freight but they were very very coarse and never got very a very fine edge.

I started making progress when I bought a King Combination Stone 250/1000 grit. The grits are on the same scale as sand-paper and the higher the grit the slower and finer the cut.

Then I acquired some medium and glassy-fine “Arkansas Stones” which is the market name of various novaculite stones that naturally occur in Arkansas. They are my preferred setup for maintaining an edge on my chisels, planes, marking knives, gouges etc.

The biggest breakthrough came when I took a friend’s advice, ordered some green honing compound (chromium oxide abrasive in green clay) and rubbed it into a strip of leather I glued to a board. 40 strokes pressing the edge hard into the strop leveled up my sharpening to hair-shaving levels and enabled me to simply push chisels through wood with hand pressure in many cases rather than driving them through with a hammer. It feels amazing and leaves a glassy finish behind in the wood. And they can slice into your hands faster than you can notice.

Buy New Here — King Stone — $18

Buy New Here — Honing Compound — $3

What to Make Next?

I got started with this kit. Pretty soon I built a bench with a vise and decided I really needed a spoke-shave to start shaping contours and making long flowing sinuous edges. There are lots of tools you can make yourself once you get confident working with this set.

When I was first getting started I spent a lot of time on Pinterest and Instagram browsing other people’s projects to get ideas and sometimes walkthroughs on how to make tools and jigs. To this day, engaging the woodworking communities on Instagram and Youtube remains one of the most rewarding and encouraging forces in my woodworking practice. You can absorb so much in terms of skill, technique and strategy just browsing around. Jump in. There’s a lot of good stuff and people are very friendly.

Feel free to reach out to share your projects or ask for help. You can find me @mattlumpkin on instagram and twitter.

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P.S. All the links to Amazon are affiliate links. So if you found this helpful, and you want to buy that Z-Saw you can click through also help my tool-fund a little bit. 🙂