I am a minimalist in life and own very few things, but one of the few things I always buy when I move to a new place is 20 stick-on-the-wall whiteboards, and over 1000 sheets of paper, and this is a big quality of cognition improvement.
(For those of you who don’t know, you can get very cheap whiteboard that stick on the wall entirely via static, and are trivially removable/repositionable. Here’s the amazon UK and US brands that I use.)
I’ve also found sharpies much better than normal pens when using paper with someone. I find it gets us out of the school mode of ‘we must write down all the words’ and into the playful diagrams/explanation mode where ‘I write down only the useful things’. More like note-taking than work.
I strongly second the stick-to-the-wall whiteboards recommendation!
I actually suspect that the performance improvement for marker over pens is due in part to increased legibility—both from the tendency to write larger when using a marker (I know that I tend to draw really tiny diagrams with pens) and because markers leave a much thicker mark on the paper.
@Ben, this post has already had a measurable positive impact on my life. I hadn’t heard of these before, and I’ve since purchased and used them to help with important decisions. Thanks!
Thank you for that link! That looks easier than finding somewhere to prop up the whiteboard in the boot of my car, I’ll give it a try. If you don’t mind me asking, why do you buy them when you move if they’re removable?
they don’t stay firm for more than two months once they’re up (they start peeling off)
while they’re eminently movable around a room, if I tried to move used ones between countries I’d expect them to tear.
for travelling with unused ones (in the UK brand), they come in a long thin box that is good for short travel e.g. to a workshop I’m giving in town, but a bit too long for my suitcase.
The US brand comes more loose and I may actually find packing them in a suitcase trivial, so we’ll see.
I am a minimalist in life and own very few things, but one of the few things I always buy when I move to a new place is 20 stick-on-the-wall whiteboards, and over 1000 sheets of paper, and this is a big quality of cognition improvement.
(For those of you who don’t know, you can get very cheap whiteboard that stick on the wall entirely via static, and are trivially removable/repositionable. Here’s the amazon UK and US brands that I use.)
I’ve also found sharpies much better than normal pens when using paper with someone. I find it gets us out of the school mode of ‘we must write down all the words’ and into the playful diagrams/explanation mode where ‘I write down only the useful things’. More like note-taking than work.
I strongly second the stick-to-the-wall whiteboards recommendation!
I actually suspect that the performance improvement for marker over pens is due in part to increased legibility—both from the tendency to write larger when using a marker (I know that I tend to draw really tiny diagrams with pens) and because markers leave a much thicker mark on the paper.
@Ben, this post has already had a measurable positive impact on my life. I hadn’t heard of these before, and I’ve since purchased and used them to help with important decisions. Thanks!
Thank you for that link! That looks easier than finding somewhere to prop up the whiteboard in the boot of my car, I’ll give it a try. If you don’t mind me asking, why do you buy them when you move if they’re removable?
Mainly because they’re cheap. Also,
they don’t stay firm for more than two months once they’re up (they start peeling off)
while they’re eminently movable around a room, if I tried to move used ones between countries I’d expect them to tear.
for travelling with unused ones (in the UK brand), they come in a long thin box that is good for short travel e.g. to a workshop I’m giving in town, but a bit too long for my suitcase.
The US brand comes more loose and I may actually find packing them in a suitcase trivial, so we’ll see.