This is what I personally do and what I've found from my own personal experience over the years. I am in no way advocating what I do over what other people do.
First of all, I love the commercially available tapered leaders for when I need a leader for presentation or for turning over long lengths of tippet. They're easy to unwind from the package if you always start from the butt end and carefully unwind it until it's no longer wound around the coils.
For any sinking lines that I use, where presentation is of no consequence, I simply use a short 2-3' section of 20# Maxima Ultra Green, and then double surgeon knot my choice of tippet to it. The short butt section of heavy mono provides adequate energy transfer to turn over your tippet and fly, allows you to change tippet a bunch of times before having to re-tie, and is much much more economical than using tapered leaders all the time.
For sink-tips and aggressive sinking lines, where I want my fly to stay near the depth that my flyline is at, the total length of my butt and tippet can be as short as 4'. For clear intermediate sinking lines used during a damselfly migration, I might use a butt/tippet combination that is around 6-8'. Bottom line is that the tippet diamter is more important to match the clarity of the water, the spookiness of the fish, and the size of the fly and fish when fishing a sinking line than the nice turnover presentation afforded by tapered leaders.
I even fish spring creeks with this short butt/tippet combination when fishing nymphs on a sinking line...and these wary fish usually scatter at the sight of 3x flurocarbon. Just food for thought.