Hexes

This is how I draw a basic mapping unit I call a Battle Map.
It's a single standard sized 8" by 10" page of quarter-inch graph paper with a hex-grid of 80, 1" hexes drawn in a geomorphic pattern that allows additional pages to be added easily.
In the scale of TFT AM each hex represents a distance from side to side of 1.3 meters.
That's roughly 4.3 feet across or about 52 inches, making each square 13 inches across or just over a square foot per quarter-inch square on the graph paper.
That gives a "good enough for government, or gameing" count for area.
I can take a lot of different scaled drawings, like a magazine of different home floor-plans, and drop it onto a map pretty simply.
If the situation calls for a more detailed accounting then I focus on the hex in question a bit closer.

I call this a Scale-hex.
Looked at from a TFT AM scale each quarter-inch square represents an area of about 3.25" square.
The rule of thumb I use for this area is if something can fit in the palm of your hand then it will fit into a three and a quarter inch square space.
I can take information like the shipping dimensions of an object right out of a catalogue or web site and represent it to a fair approximation quickly.
This makes the construct useful for issues like reach and facing as well as simple questions like just where exactly in the hex was the Ring of Power dropped?
I encourage pantomime on the part of my players and can try to represent how their visualizing an Action more directly with this setup, especially when the players Figure is of radically different size than the player.

It's certainly not a scientific system, but I can take a lot of real-world data and plug it into the game-world fairly easily with it on the TFT scale.
A neat little discovery was how effective this format is at a range of wider scales.
I've tried to keep a focus on what can reasonably be done on a "kitchen table" area with commonly available equipment.
No stuff that's "special order" should be required for play IMO.
So I ended up with those 1" Square-hexes on quarter-inch graph.
It turns out that by sticking to common standards for paper size and measurement this way of drawing the hex "snaps to" other grid systems pretty simply.

Of course there are problems with this on the scale of the planet.

It's not perfect, but it's something, and in many mapping systems, like Section, Township, and Range, it ends up working out really well with each quarter-inch square equaling 1 square mile on my county maps of Oregon for example.

Because Battle Map pages are geomorphic I can lay them out in a rough approximation of a hex-grid and use 1 page of Square-hexes to represent a layout of up to 80 Battle Maps.
I can squeeze a football field or an old school baseball field onto a page with that method, with each hex representing a Battle Map.