I've been doing most of my dimensioning lately by hand and I still try to figure out if it's best to dimension my pieces first before crosscutting them to length or after? I'm working on a stool now where I can get two stiles out of one length, so it's fairly small in size. Do most people dimension a 24" length (for example) and then cut it down into small chunks or rough to all the small pieces and then dimension each piece separately? What do most people find the quickest and most efficient when working with hand tools? I understand that on much larger pieces you obviously rough cut to size and then dimension with hand planes and then final cut to exact length, but is it faster to dimension 2 - 12"x3" pieces or one 24" piece x 3" wide or does it not really matter? Haha