Which is better, sticky notes or index cards?
In a world of virtual meetings, does it matter?
I recently posted this image of a work in progress. Someone claimed in a comment that it demonstrates the superiority of index cards over sticky notes. It was an interesting comment that got me thinking.
Certainly both have stood the test of longevity. Index cards continue to thrive long after libraries abandoned them for digital systems. People use them for recipes, note-taking, portable to-do lists and so on. Students use them to study and authors use them to write books. Visit any software company and you will see desks, walls and whiteboard peppered with sticky notes.
I will use one or the other, depending on the use case, because they have different affordances. Sticky notes are good for temporary thinking and for putting information anywhere. Want to remember something you want to take with you? Put a sticky note on the door. Want to think collaboratively about a complex topic? Sticky notes on a whiteboard can be useful. But they are temporary by nature. When working with stickies, I like to take a photo, because stickies fall off. Stickies are great, but don’t expect them to stick around forever. And you can’t easily sort and file them because they stick to each other.
Index cards, on the other hand, persist. They can have a long life. Consider how long they might live in a library. Index cards created in the 1760s by Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of index cards, still exist today. Index cards are great for keeping your thoughts and notes in a form that can be easily filed, arranged, reconfigured and so on.
The interesting thing about all of this is that while these distinctions matter a lot in the physical world, they begin to disappear in online whiteboard systems such as Miro and Mural. Unlike index cards, they are easy to “stick” to the wall, and they maintain their position. Unlike sticky notes, they can be easily sorted and stacked, and they persist.
Not too long ago, it was clear that visual collaboration worked better in the physical world than the digital world. The digital tools were just not ready for mainstream use. But today that has changed. Tools like Mural and Miro are powerful, inexpensive, accessible, easy to use, robust systems that in many ways are better than face-to-face collaboration options.
There is no “whiteboard scarcity” in a virtual whiteboard environment. You never have to erase the whiteboard or remove the stickies. You just start a new board and you can come back to it later at any time. Nobody has to be assigned the onerous task of “transcribing the stickies into a spreadsheet.” The distinction between index cards and stickies is moot.
There are still some issues, of course. The personal relationships that form when people meet face to face are significant. When people meet face to face they take breaks together, eat meals together and so on. They build deeper relationships. People who collaborate using physical whiteboards and stickies are also more physically active, they move more. This is not only healthier but does stimulate thought.
But these days, even when it’s feasible to meet face to face, I will often recommend we meet virtually anyway so we have a better, more persistent work product.
After all, working virtually doesn’t preclude face-to-face meetings. If we’re in the same office, we can work virtually and still get a coffee or have lunch together!
Until next time,
Good one Dave. I have had the same realisation of the power of MIRO and MURALS. I am keen to now use them even in face to face workshops. Just need more table facilitation for that to work.
I like how you've captured the pros and cons of each approach. Index cards and sticky notes certainly offer advantages over whiteboards and flip charts in terms of being able to move different pieces of information around.
There's also the venerable cork board, of course, which gives index cards the ability to defy gravity with the equally venerable push pin. Not that cork boards are omnipresent...