I’m becoming a huge evangalist for Adam Savage’s ‘First order retrievability’ concept, and I’m slowly applying it to wider areas in my space. Here’s the latest round, a caddy to hold all my jewellers screwdrivers (including torx!), tweezers, knifes, pearl catch, centre punch, scribes, hooks, tiny files, pliers, pens, pencils, markers, rulers, vernier calipers, and a few other bits and pieces.

Having everything laid out like this means that:

• You don’t forget that you’ve got a tool. Might sound silly, but there’s been a number of times where I’ve bought a duplicate of a tool or part just because I forgot I had one already.
  • A related problem is forgetting a type of tool exists. See the silver rods with the black tips at the back left? They’re a nifty wrench specifically for getting into things like camera lenses and watch cases. Beautiful tool, makes life easy. But if I put it in a drawer, after a few months I’d probably forget about it, and if I came to open a watch would reach for pliers first without thinking.
• You can reach it straight away, without having to unpack other stuff. Don’t have to break the ‘flow’ in the middle of a tinkering session to go find where your torx screwdrivers are.
• It invites easy cleanup. The tool’s ‘home’ is right there, takes no emotional energy to put it back when you’re finished. Compare that to fetching a storage box and putting it back on the shelf. Also means you’re less prone to leave loads of stuff out because you might need it ‘soonish’.
• It takes less emotional energy to start a project. I know that I can sit down at the bench and just start tinkering. If I had to go grab things from shelves before starting, it’d be another excuse to sit on the couch instead. And we’ve all got too many of those in our lives.

Files up here; http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1034281