Sharpen your Axe

The Wrong Kind of Busy

If you have never watched competitive timbersports, you should. It is the sort of thing you flick to by accident on a Sunday afternoon and cannot look away from. A man stands on a horizontal log the width of a frying pan,¹ swings an axe between his own feet, and cuts clean through it in under twelve seconds.² The audience goes mad.

But the real event happened hours earlier, off camera. The same man sat with a pair of compasses, scratching arcs from each corner of the blade to find its exact centre point. He checked with calipers, locked the head into a jig, ground the edge in careful bursts, filed the bevel to exactly 20 degrees.³ Thinner cuts better; thinner also chips. Every competitor has their own answer to that trade-off, and the good ones keep it secret.

Most knowledge workers have the opposite instinct. They spend their days inside other people’s tools. Someone else’s note-taking app, someone else’s text editor, someone else’s workflow. They type faster, learn shortcuts, maybe install a plugin or two. They swing the axe harder.

There is a saying, often attributed to Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Lincoln never said it.⁴ An Oklahoma pastor coined it in 1944, quoting an anonymous lumberjack — and the original was measured in minutes, not hours. Each retelling inflated the numbers. The insight survived the inflation. The person who sharpens first will outperform the person who swings dully all day. Not by a little. By a lot.

But most people never sharpen the axe. They feel too busy chopping.

What Sharpening Looks Like

For a programmer, sharpening the axe means building the thing that makes the next thing easier to build.

I keep a knowledge base; not a folder of half-forgotten bookmarks, but a living system. I wrote tools to pull down research papers, parse them, and produce summaries in a structure I find useful. The base holds detailed prompts that describe how I like my notes organised, how I think through problems, how I want information presented back to me. It even holds a style guide for my own writing — six pages of rules about sentence length, banned vocabulary, and what good prose sounds like.⁵

None of these tools was urgent. Nobody was asking for them. But each piece compounds. A good summarisation prompt saves me twenty minutes per paper. Over a hundred papers, that is a working week. A well-structured knowledge base means I can find my own thinking from six months ago, instead of reconstructing it from scratch. The tool pays for itself, then keeps paying. Good tools remove friction. Great tools remove decisions.

The Arithmetic Has Changed

An xkcd chart maps how long you can spend automating a task before you waste more time than you save.

It is a sensible chart. For years it was right. If a task takes five minutes and you do it weekly, you get roughly four hours a year to build the automation before you are underwater. Most custom tools took longer than four hours to build, so people rightly left them unbuilt.

That arithmetic no longer holds. The cost of building a small tool has collapsed. A script that once took an afternoon now takes fifteen minutes of describing what you want. The xkcd break-even line has moved so far down the chart that tasks you would never have bothered automating are now obvious candidates. The five-minute weekly chore? You can automate it in less time than doing it once by hand.

Cheap tools change the compounding story. When each tool costs fifteen minutes, you build more of them; and the ones worth paying attention to are not the tools that save you five minutes but the tools that make other tools. A knowledge base helps you write good prompts. Good prompts help you process new information. Better information helps you build the next tool. The xkcd chart assumes each automation is independent. They stack. The hard part is no longer justifying the first push; it is noticing the friction in the first place.

Sharpen Your Axe

If you do knowledge work and you have not built a tool in the last month, you are probably swinging too hard and sharpening too little.

Start small. Write a script that automates something tedious. Build a template for a document you create often. Describe your preferences in enough detail that a machine could follow them. You are not wasting time. You are building leverage.

The tree will still be there when you are done sharpening.