Clean Your Slates

Whiteboards are meant to be erased.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got nothing against the use of whiteboards. I love them; there are two eight-footers in my office, and I just had one of them moved so I didn’t have to climb over furniture to get to it. What I’ve got a problem with are the ones everyone is afraid to erase because they’ve got important things written on them. Those need to die.

Whiteboards are great tools for getting ideas out of your head. Like mind maps1, I find them really useful for organizing my thoughts and finding the structure in my otherwise pinball-like thinking. I use them when I don’t have a clear enough idea of where I’m going to write a first draft of something. In a group situation, whiteboards are great for finding patterns and building consensus about what to do next.

They shouldn’t, however, be part of what to do next, and this where a lot of people get stuck. My officemate had a useful reference table written on his whiteboard for more than a year. It was great to have that prominent and visible, but it shouldn’t have been on the whiteboard. It should have been typed up, printed out, and taped to the wall next to the whiteboard.

Scott Berkun posted something a few weeks ago about the cult of busy. I’m slowly coming to believe that the phenomenon of the permanently-filled whiteboard is due (at least in part) to the cult of clutter. We’re afraid of clean whiteboards because they make it look like we haven’t done anything. Keep the board full, and you show people that you’ve done something.

Maybe there’s something more going here, though. Maybe blank whiteboards challenge us to do something new. Like a painter’s canvas or a writer’s empty page, a blank whiteboard says, “I don’t care what you’ve done already. You have to answer to me.” Clean whiteboards don’t just make us look bad in front others; they make us question ourselves.

To that I say: Bring it on. While I was erasing that useful table from my officemate’s whiteboard yesterday, three things came together in my head. First, a while back I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ’s Finding Flow, which introduced me to the concept of psychic entropy, a term he uses to describe the disorder in our mental lives. Dealing with psychic entropy drains us and leaves less able to do our best work. Second, I’ve been following Leo Babuata’s advice to spend a little bit of time each day “decluttering,” and that’s made me realize that entropy in the physical space around me causes mental entropy as well. Finally, the Scrum work I’ve been doing has emphasized the importance of “doneness,” the idea that by getting tasks and projects to a state where you don’t have to come back to “finish them off,” you free yourself to move forward and focus on what’s important now, rather than what was important then. Done is the engine of more, as the kids say, and dirty whiteboards represent unfinished work.

Once you’re done with a whiteboard session, you know enough to figure out what more permanent storage your results need to live in. Move them there, and leave a clean slate behind you. Don’t worry about the empty space. You’ll fill it up soon enough.



1 Yes, I also believe in deleting mind maps when you're done with them.

Comments

[Scott Berkun]

Good post - I like the way you think.

While I agree, I also know of exceptions. Sometimes I have a problem or idea that i can't solve all at once. It needs to linger and sit around, while my subconscious gnaws away at it for awhile. Leaving it somewhere visible can give me a reminder once a day to do some of that gnawing.

I've also had this experience: making a list on a whiteboard of super-uber-ultra important stuff. And then to discover, a week later, than none of those things I thought were so critical a week ago actually turned out to be. It was a reminder to me that whenever I write, or do, or say something, it doesn't make it so. It can all be erased or rendered irrelevant regardless of how I feel about it at the time I write it or make it. There's something liberating in this to me - it rarely makes sense to feel stressed about a todo list, or a set of projects as somehow the world often changes enough that my list is rarely as important as I think it is when I make it.