13 Ways Of Looking at a Post-It Note

It’s the best-designed “thinking tool” in history. What could it tell us about designing software?

“Sticky Note Therapy” by Phil Roeder

What’s the best “tool for thought”?

I write a lot about cognition and technology, so I think about this a ton. I’ve always loved Howard Rheingold’s coinage of “tools for thought” — pieces of tech that help us organize our mental work, find and sort information, and make sense of the world.

So: What is the best tool we have, right now, for thought?

Is it the Internet? The smartphone? The word processor, or the digital camera? The relational database, or Google, or … I dunno, GPT-3 or something?

Nope. For my money, it’s much simpler:

It’s the Post-It Note.

For decades I’ve admired this humble little scrap of paper and glue. Nearly everyone in the modern industrialized world has seen them, and probably uses them. You see them stuck on the edge of laptop screens, festooned across instrument panels in factories, peeking out from the pages of books, and sometimes just full-on wallpapering an entire office of some poor sod who’s been working on a Jarndyce-vs.-Jarndyce-level problem.