Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

by Adam Savage

the one I love the most is Bullet Eight: “Always Be Knolling.” Knolling is an organizational process that Tom learned from, of all people, the janitor at Frank Gehry’s furniture shop in Los Angeles when he worked there in the late 1980s. Every day, the janitor—a fellow named Andrew Cromwell—would come into the shop to sweep and vacuum. But first, before he got to any of that, he would go to each workstation and neatly line up all the tools and materials that were still out on the work surface in parallel lines or at 90-degree angles to each other. One day, Tom was still in the shop when Andrew came in to set about his normal routine, and he was amazed and delighted by what he saw. “Andrew, what is that?” Tom asked. “That’s so beautiful, the way you line everything up, what is that called?” Andrew shrugged. He looked around, looked up at the wall, saw a sign hanging up for the company that was sponsoring the project Tom and his team were working on (the furniture designer, Knoll), and said, “Knolling?” “So it just became that,” Tom told me. “And I picked it up and started using it in my everyday life.” “What was the original point of it, though?” I asked. “To make his job easier, I guess.” Boy does it ever.