[essem]

I've struggled for years to articulate my ideas and express things clearly, 'specially when it comes to challenging technical problems. One day, I randomly bought a tiny 12" x 5" whiteboard while I was at the dollar store, with the intention of using it to keep a physical todo list.

I eventually reached for it while in the heat of a challenging debugging session with some colleagues, and was surprised with how much it helped me solve the problem at hand. It quickly stopped being a todo-list after this incident. Turned out my inability to articulate things effectively was not because I was stupid, but because I am a predominantly visual thinker.

The fact people are working on tools like this excites the hell out of me!

[walterbell]

Could you share a little about the difference between the small whiteboard and a letter-sized paper notebook?

[essem]

Paper in my experience can get messy real quick. Example - When drawing a diagram of some process it is common for me to want to tweak and reconfigure things to arrive at a solution. With paper, it requires you either erase, scratch out, or re draw the diagram with your desired changes on another page.

What I love about marker boards is the ability to freely draft and modify on the fly without worry. When I want to commit ideas to "storage", paper works best :)

[noobly]

I agree 100%! Though I prefer to store things digitally. I feel so liberated no longer having so many scratch pieces of paper around that may contain an important note or solution to a problem. I remember working through a calculus book and having about half a foot's worth of paper (notes, attempts at solving problems, rewritten solutions to problems, etc) that eventually fell victim to entropy and was absolutely useless for anything but that I kept around out of fear of forgetting all of it. At least now it's all in one box. Maybe I'll burn it this winter as kindling - or would that be too derivative? :^)

These days, anything short term -> whiteboard, anything refined and meaningful enough for reusing later -> PC.

[undoware]

that sounds fantastic!

fwiw I came to a similar solution but it came in the form of a battery powered eraser and a big pad of paper.

erasure is the problem, not marking. a good soft graphite pencil and an electric eraser is my whiteboard ^^