A personal tool map

Over the extremely hectic holiday season, I finally got to take a solid chunk of vacation time away from work. That's great for not having to worry about data stuff, but it's pretty bad for finding inspiration on a new post. Add that to the chaos of house and kid activities over the period and things can get pretty tough. So in the quiet little hours in between everything, I sat down and... opened up a spreadsheet to type into.

The spreadsheet I made was this one, and it's a very simple inventory of "tools that I use for hobby stuff, and what hobby they're for". The reason I wanted to draft this list up was because I wanted to see to what extent my hobbies actually overlap in terms of tool use. It's very common for me use a tool purchased for one hobby as a gateway justification for starting another hobby, so I wanted to see if there were lots of these "bridging" tools, and how they tied the various hobbies together.

So, after a weekend of thinking up as many tools I own as possible, where tools are defined as an object or software I purchased to use to accomplish a task specifically related to a hobby. I also excluded most consumable items like electronic parts, drill bits, etc. unless they had an extremely specific use since there would be nearly no end to the list of consumables used.

While working on this dataset, which only had 3 columns, I really started wishing I followed some data entry best practice and normalized inputs, but that was 170 entries in and its too late for that. A bit of exporting to CSV and then messing with Gephi, and I got my hands on a network diagram that looked like a barely-legible meatball instead of an incomprehensible hairball. You can see the results of my lack of design skills above.

What I found was that hobbies do tend to have very specialized equipment, so they tend to cluster quite strongly. The bridges between hobbies tend to be quite rare and often share some kind of thematic component. For example, there's a number of sharpening tools that are shared across woodworking and cooking. Audio and video hobbies are largely linked because cameras and microphones are shared resources. The "#DIY" tag I used to stand in for "fixing/making stuff around the house" acts as a catchall that finds secondary uses for many hobby-specific tools.

I was actually a bit surprised how little overlap there is between most of my hobbies. Sure, if I go out of my way, I could find more cross uses between hobbies for certain pieces of equipment, but it really does take effort to manufacture a contrived situation

This situation is probably made worse by the fact that I generally try to get tools that are primarily good at single tasks. I'd prefer to have a tool that does one job particularly well than a tool that is mediocre at many things. It's why I still wear a watch and carry a digital camera despite owning a smart phone. It's also why there's like 5 different types of saws hiding in the list.

If anything, the one thing I take away from this little adventure is that bridging tools are really cool objects because they're surprisingly rare. It takes a lot of thinking, planning, imagination, and some knowledge of a new hobby space to find one and then dare to buy one. But once you do take that leap, you connect to a whole new world of interesting knowledge and tools, among which you might get lucky and find yet another bridge.

For now, I'm going to try to update the spreadsheet a bit more when I unpack and rediscover all the tools I couldn't just recall off the top of my head.

If anyone has ideas to expand on this little endeavor, either with thoughts about how to expand the dataset, or how I can visualize things better, please let me know!

Wish everyone a happy 2025!

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About this newsletter

I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.

All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise credited.

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