Idea: Monitors and sticky notes

During a 1:1 with one of my reports today, he brought a pad of post-it notes to the meeting and was jotting to-do's down on them, and I pointed out how I also had stickies all over my monitor. We ended up talking about how people manage their task list, a very relevant discussion to anyone who works with email, Outlook, Exchange, etc.

Even though I have a lot of software at my disposal to help manage these things, I still use plenty of stickies as well as my trusty moleskine notebook. The "sticky on monitor" concept seems to be very common, at least here at msft.

If it is indeed a more universal thing as we suspect it is, he raised an interesting question: Why haven't the monitor companies gotten together with 3M to figure out how to take advantage of this? Have a post-it dispenser that either is part of the monitor or ships as an add-on (so I won't keep setting down the pad somewhere and misplacing it), make sure that there is enough width outside of the actual screen for the width of one of the larger post-it sizes.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  That's why I mentioned add-on as an option, this could be some kind of clip that just attaches to the side. And one way to break away from the cost/commodity world is to un-commoditize it, build something into your product first that people want that nobody else has. For some reason I buy charmin every time I buy toilet paper. It's just toilet paper, why the heck would it matter what brand I buy? Why aren't they all completely equal at this stage? Yet for some reason I buy charmin... not that integrating post-its into a monitor frame is the killer app, but more to your general comment.

• Anonymous
  October 26, 2006
  name a monitor manufacturer not a seller, retailer, but an actual manufacturer. if you can name one, is it on your desktop? thats why they haven't innovated, its a pure cost/commodity world and all the innovations are cost related not functional

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2006
  I always thought that one being a msft employee, is required by the work contract to use Outlook's Post-it feature instead of the real thing. Now i know it's a completely useless feature.