I was writing on a post-it note in a pub the other day but, when I went to pick it up, I found out that my Super Sticky Post-it® Note had become ultra extra mega super sticky. The beer spilt by a previous customer had dried and become one of the stickiest surfaces known to man.
Then it hit me: rather than spend a small fortune on sticky notes, what we need is a sticky board. We’ve been going about it the wrong way; sure, for an impromptu discussion, sticky notes work well as they can fix to a window/wall/door/person. But why, when we use the same agile board every day, do we still rely on these things that sometimes curl up and fall off.
I heard a top tip recently from Dan Brown: peel the sticky note from the back of the pad because they then curl towards the board rather than being in a constant attempt to fall off. It works. But I still think there is an alternative.
So, back to my board idea. What we need are sticky boards that attract our tickets to the board, rather than the other way round. What we need is a board that is perpetually sticky so it can hold up small pieces of paper or card, plus an avatar or two. This would allow us to print out our stories from Jira (or whichever requirements management system you are using) and just throw them on to the board.
Unfortunately, stale beer has an unattractive aroma that accompanies it, so I looked around for other ideas. I heard about static sheets that you can stick to a wall and, after a bit of searching, found a board by Justic that uses “electro-adhesion technology“. Only problem is that a decent-sized board costs about the same as 10,000 Post-it notes.
Maybe I can put up with the smell of stale beer. Or, as someone remarked in the pub, we could just use blu-tack.