In my shop I continue to discover new tricks so long as I don’t work on automatic pilot. After thirty years of cutting tenons with haunches for grooved frame-and-panelling it suddenly occurred to me I don’t need to measure the cutback, only the depth of the haunch, since whatever the tenon measures can be copied exactly onto the mortise site—duh!
It’s not that I do everything by hand if there’s a faster machine method, but it’s surprising how machines tend to exert the ‘tyranny of exact measurement’ whereas hand methods can be a far quicker method of simple eye-estimates. After all, who can tell how wide a tenon is when once assembled? So where is the advantage of having taken extra time to measure it exactly?