The Carpenter's Shaving and the Wisdom of the Wasted Effort
There is a moment in hand-planing a piece of wood that feels, on its face, like the very definition of inefficiency. You’ve measured, you’ve marked, you’ve set the plane’s blade to a fine depth. You lean into the tool, pushing forward with a steady, practiced pressure. A thin, almost translucent curl of wood rises from the mouth of the plane, curls over itself, and falls silently into the growing pile at your feet.
This pile of shavings is the byproduct. It is the waste. It is the material you have removed to get to the thing you actually want: the flat, smooth, dimensioned board. In a world obsessed with lean processes and zero waste, the shaving is an affront. It represents effort expended for no tangible gain, a subtraction with no additive result. We are conditioned to see such byproducts as evidence of a flawed method, something to be minimized and swept away without a second thought.
But the master carpenter sees it differently. To them, the shaving is not a record of waste, but a record of work. Each delicate curl is a receipt for a perfect pass. Its consistency speaks to the evenness of the craftsman’s pressure and the sharpness of the blade. Its length is a testament to a clear, unimpeded path. The pile itself is a measure of progress, a physical manifestation of the labor invested to reveal the true surface hidden beneath the rough.
The Unmeasured Progress
We chase productivity metrics that are easily counted: words written, lines of code committed, tasks checked off a list. These are our finished boards, clean and measurable. But we have no metric for the shavings. We don’t value the three failed drafts that led to the final paragraph, the discarded code snippets that helped us understand the problem, or the quiet half-hour of staring out the window that allowed a solution to crystallize. We sweep these mental shavings away, embarrassed by them, seeing them only as evidence of time misspent.
The lesson of the shaving is that real, quality work often requires a period of subtraction. It requires the removal of the extraneous, the poorly formed, and the rough. This removal feels like waste because its product is negative space. But that negative space is what defines the final form. You cannot achieve a true edge without planing away the splintered, unreliable wood around it.
Perhaps our workflows need a designated bin for shavings. Not to mourn them, but to honor them. To recognize that the pile of discarded ideas, the aborted sketches, and the quiet, thoughtful pauses are not inefficiencies. They are the necessary, wasted effort that proves you are carving away the superficial to get to the solid, true work underneath. The goal isn’t to have no shavings; it’s to understand that each one brings you closer to the grain.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: