Things that we buy are made with other things: blades, bits, molds, etc. In manufacturing parlance, these things include tools, fixtures to hold and guide those tools, and jigs to facilitate setups and changeovers. Collectively, these things are known as tooling.
Tooling is an input cost for anything that is manufactured. By one estimate, tooling represents about 3% of the cost of a manufactured good (compared to labor and machinery at 58%). Tooling is a big deal and engineers devote careers to making decisions about appropriate drill bits or molds given the material and production volume of a particular good.
Ultimately, tooling is about buying, creating, and deploying the right tools for any given job or task. You don't have to wear steel-toed boots to care about tooling. It's also a big deal in the white collar world. Developers, for example, generally spend more than 30% of their time building internal applications for their employers: dashboards, data entry interfaces, administration panels, etc. These things are all knowledge work tooling. These two scenarios give us a rough range for the cost of tooling: somewhere between 3% and 30%.
How much time do you spend on tooling for the work that you do? Management might think of you as a kind of automaton that works from morning till night on a series of repeatable tasks. The reality of knowledge work is somewhat different. Often, there is no best or recommended practice. Instead, we have a variety of different practices that may -- or may not -- get us towards some goal. We need to build a set of individual practices that we mature on an ongoing basis so that we get better at what we do.
We must invest in knowledge tooling. Ideally, we could spend something like 20% of our time simply creating and improving the tools we use to do our jobs.
References
I've pulled the cost of tooling from these resources:
https://www.mscdirect.com/betterMRO/tooling-cost-purchase-price
https://retool.com/blog/state-of-internal-tools-2021/
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