Essential Work Habits with Chris Gochnour
A tin-type portrait of Chris Gochnour at Luminaria SLC
Essential Work Habits with Chris Gochnour
By Chris Proctor
Our work habits rule our daily professional lives and by extension, the trajectory of our careers and bodies of work. Our habits have the potential to do our careers and bodies serious harm, to hold us in a state of inertia, or to assist and propel us along our chosen path. Because our habits hold such dominion over our personal and professional lives, it pays huge dividends to develop good habits and constantly reflect and analyze how our habits are affecting us.
Last week I sat down with Chris Gochnour, contributing editor to the nation’s foremost woodworking publication, Fine Woodworking Magazine, and professor at Salt Lake Community College’s school of Furniture Design and Cabinetmaking, to chat about his career and touch on some of the essential work habits he has developed over his 30-year career as a professional furniture builder, writer and teacher.
Chris has become one of the country’s most knowledgeable craftsmen on hand tools and traditional furniture building techniques. One of his first articles for Fine Woodworking nearly 20 years ago was an explanation of knock-down furniture building techniques, which allowed large armories, buffets and hutches to be built in a shop, disassembled for shipping, and reassembled in a client’s home using no fasteners, but wooden joinery techniques instead.
Today these techniques are emulated by knock-down fasteners popularized by companies like IKEA, but with cheapened materials that, while making furniture affordable, drag down the level of quality and longevity. The woodworking techniques that Chris wrote about in that article, developed over thousands of years, require years of practice to master and provide an end product that is beautiful and long-lasting, oftentimes outliving the builder by generations.
When a piece of furniture with a particularly sweet design nears completion and begins to take shape, I’m sometimes stuck looking at it for minutes every time I leave the shop, picking up my bag, leaning up against the bench opposite mine and pondering on it for a few minutes.
While pondering, two things are usually going through my head. First, I feel like a total badass. Second, I’m humbled by the work of every artisan before me who developed these tools and techniques, and floored by how much I still have to learn, how much I never will learn. The dissonance created by feeling triumphant yet humbled, prideful yet thankful, can be exhilarating. Add to that feeling enough physical exhaustion from work and what you get is a recipe for occasional tears. I’m thankful that to date I’ve not had anyone in the shop catch me crying happy/stress tears at my bench at 1:30 in the morning, although that might be a funny interaction.
This moment I’ve described is, for me, the best part of being a self-employed artisan. The breath before the plunge. The moment of inertia providing a quick respite before I willingly tumble head first into it once again. Difficulty and self-doubt are a constant companion when choosing the life of a self-employed person, but there are many things we can do to alleviate a great deal of that adversity. The essential work habits Gochnour touches on in this interview are useful tools in alleviating that adversity. Whether we are talking about woodworking, graphic design or HR, these skills can help us improve our daily professional and personal lives, thereby affecting the course of our lives and careers for the better.
“Layout is everything.”
Gochnour - “When I taught at the University of Utah, we had a Japanese temple builder visit to teach a 3-day technical joint workshop. He would spend half of the day drawing layouts and half the day woodworking. That’s simply how long it takes to ensure accuracy. Once you have your layout, you must respect your layout. If you work to the lines everything comes together. With machines, not much layout is required. Hand tools are completely different. You are always working to lines. If you work to your lines things come together as they should. My hand tool woodworking makes me a better machine woodworker because it requires so much more focus, respect and precision. Those tendencies you develop transfer to other aspects of your woodworking that make you more careful and more precise as you do.”
Proctor - Focus, respect and precision; three ideas that encompass what is required in the development of artistry. I feel that the more I practice these ideas the easier it is to access their benefits, even if my motivation to practice ebbs and flows.
“Take time to sharpen the saw.”
Gochnour - “The reality is our tendency is to plow ahead in life and to not necessarily take the needed time to maintain, tune and sharpen. If you try to work with dull tools it's more dangerous. They require more force, they create more noise, and just all around the result is not as good as it could be. This says to me, take a little bit of time to get these things as they should be, and they’ll pay dividends in the long run. Things will go quicker, be more precise, more enjoyable and the result will be better. It takes a willingness to set aside plowing ahead with the hope that the little delay in the process will be compensated with a better process and better results.”
Proctor - Every time I have to stop work because a tool isn’t working right, or my space is too cluttered to work well, I feel deflated. However, things always progress more smoothly after the fact. Our workspace, the items we keep in it and the way they are presented, is a direct reflection of our personal work philosophy, intentional or not.
“One step at a time.”
Gochnour - “My wife and I went hiking last summer. There is a really nice hike up in the Wasatch called the Pfeifferhorn. It’s quite an ambitious hike, a 2,000 ft elevation gain in 7 miles. I had done it several times, but I wanted to hike it with Natalie. Well, she didn’t have the confidence that she could do it. I said let’s just take it as far as we can and lo and behold, she did it and I think she was just completely amazed because she hadn’t been hiking much at the time. The way she did it was by taking it one step at a time.”
Proctor - If you look at an ambitious project as a whole it can be daunting and overwhelming, sometimes so much that the project never starts. If we learn to compartmentalize, keep lists, make and follow deadlines, suddenly we find that we’ve gone a long way in a relatively short amount of time.
“Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”
Gochnour - “This is something I did really well when I first started getting into woodworking. People would come to me with a commission and it was something I would love to do but it was over my head. They were things I didn’t know or skills I hadn’t acquired yet and I was smart enough to say to them ‘I would love to but I’m unable’.
In reality, the pieces I was building at the beginning I was having to learn as I built. The commissions are how I learned everything. I read books and I built things. You can look at it as a series of building blocks. The things I was building at the beginning were rectilinear, simple joinery, no curves, no veneer. Then somebody would bring something along and it had a little new territory, but most of it I was comfortable with. I was willing to take that on because it forced me to learn new things and I was confident I could figure it out, and then you have that in your arsenal from then on.”
Proctor - I think this goes well with the previous work habit. Take things one step at a time and don’t bite off more than you can chew. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push the envelope of what is possible. It just means you should do so in a way that is focused, manageable and realistic.
“Maintain a healthy relationship with your craft.”
Gochnour - “I was drawn to the craft early in life and applied my strengths as builder, problem solver, and creator to everything from skateboards and snowboards to tables and chairs. I build because I love to build.
When I build my own designs, I feel a deep connection with the piece. When I build for others, I enjoy the collaboration with clients. Both are fulfilling to me. Whether I build with my own aesthetic in mind or the preferences of others, I am satisfied so long as I build a high-quality, visually appealing, and enduring piece. This is the artistry of woodworking for me.”
Proctor - I have a few artists and woodworkers in mind who excel at making and keeping good relationships with their clients and they are all successful.
Although Gochnour and I spoke exclusively about woodworking, I think that these practices can be extended to any career or facet of life. For instance, consider “Take time to sharpen the saw.” This phrase is a matter of maintenance and preparation. Another way to say this might be the french phrase, mise en place, or everything in place. Although this phrase is normally attributed to baking, it can be extended to any art, skill or facet of life that is in need of improved preparation.
I find that I must actively think about these habits and struggle to apply them in my daily life, making me still very much in practice. Although now that I think about it, I’ve been given every indication from professionals ahead of me that the practice never ends, it just gets easier the harder you try.