By hand

Up until recently, I used to be the kind of person who wanted to do as much as physically possible with his own two hands. I've always been pretty bad at asking for help, so I've kind of just slowly trained myself to be able to adapt to things. And it wasn't that I ever looked down on people who did ask for help - I just didn't want that person to be me. This involved stuff like using power tools, simply because I didn't view that as actually being me that did it. Everything is cooler when it's made by hand after all, right?

It's not that I don't necessarily still think this way. Old habits die hard. But as I've started to take on multiple projects of varying difficulty, I've found that this philosophy of wanting to do everything by hand makes me want to do the work less. Which is silly, because I enjoy the work and I want to keep going. But intentionally physically exhausting myself when I don't need to doesn't help anyone - in fact, you can't visibly see the different in the product at the end unless I make an error at a machine. And the only way to learn how not to do that is to keep using the machines and slowly gain more experience with them.

And it's funny, because as I get more power tools, I start to realize that there are more things that they enable me to do. And it's not that I couldn't necessarily do them before, but it's certainly easier and more inviting to do them now. Things like making curved surfaces in wood or just generally leaving overhangs on the material so that I have room for error down the road. It's things that I definitely could have done before, but that become more feasible and enjoyable as I get easier ways to do them. And the easier I can work, the faster I can get things done, and the faster I work, the more projects I can make. So hopefully soon I'll just be powering through stuff every day.