For the love of lo-tech

I firmly believe that the post-it note is one of the single greatest inventions of the twentieth century, if only because I couldn’t make it through a normal workday without them.  I scribble — notes, call numbers, library card numbers, to-do lists, personal reminders — all over them, both at home and at work, and I sometimes find myself using various sizes and assorted colors for different purposes.  While the post-it’s versatility (easy attachment, easy removal, attachability to almost anything) makes it a miracle among office supplies, it’s also a great example of how lo-tech solutions often ended up being the most useful and the most, dare I say, timeless.

This past week, I put the post-it’s lo-tech innovation to work, and in a pretty ironic way.  Here’s an image of how a coworker and I ended up outlining a draft for the library’s technology plan.  It’s three sheets of simple white paper, with boxes in blue ink drawn to represent categories for the plan’s goals and objectives.  To start, the goals and objectives were all written on post-its and attached, without any regard to organization, to a plain sheet of paper and then moved to the other sheets to the appropriate categories.  Some further shuffling and revision took place (include the creation of some subcategories), but all in all, the post-its nicely sum up what areas we want to see covered in the next technology plan, and their arrangement on the sheets should make writing the draft much easier.

I’m still a little giggly that we used something as basic yet ingenious as post-its to summarize some pretty high-tech goals and objectives.  It might not be that surprising, but it definitely makes me happy.  Sometimes the simplest solutions really are the most effective.

Can you think of any other lo-tech solutions in your workplace?