Kitchen tip: measurements en place

I doubt that this kitchen tip, which I submitted to Cook's Illustrated, will get published. So I'll share it with you here. In several recipes that I make, things need to be measured and cut to a certain size. For example, Cook's loves to have you make a foil sling for your brownies and then just lift the whole shebang out as a slab. For the foil to fit, it has to be a certain length and width.

I'm not the type to eyeball a measurement like that, but instead of fetching my ruler every time, I've noted the lengths needed on the control panel of my stove. The stove panel works well because it has all those knobs and text and buttons and lights as reference points. Maybe you have a stretch of tile in your kitchen that would work as well (e.g. 3.5 tiles). Once I had my length markers measured I footnoted them in the recipe. Now I don't need the ruler in the kitchen; I just roll the foil out from the edge of the stove to the edge of the clock and cut there.