alt Hacker NewsThere's also the concept of a story stick.
When working on a project where you need a bunch of things to be the same, you take a stick and mark on it at various points the dimensions you're using -- when working on a house, it might be things like the heights of outlet boxes and switches, the width and height of rough opening for doors, the height of window sills, etc etc.
Then, you just use the stick as the reference, using the marking for outlets to position all of the outlets instead of measuring the height of the floor in inches or millimeters or cubits or whatever each time. It's kind of like a measuring jig.
("Measure once, cut twice" is a superior methodology which has been unfairly maligned for generations.)
This works fantastic for building furniture as well, where the absolute dimension doesn’t matter as much as all of the pieces having matching dimensions. A cabinet with drawers, for example. The story stick captures the spacing between the drawers, the width of the drawer, the slightly smaller height of the drawer face, etc.
It feels really imprecise the first time you set the fence on a table saw based on a marking on a stick instead of a precise specific value but the results are hard to argue with.