If you’ve ever visited a Daiso store before, you’ll have felt the liberating spell that it casts over its customers. All manner of novel and useful household items are neatly arranged and available for the same low price. The first time I took my mum to one, we easily filled up a shopping basket with kitchen utensils, neck massagers, stationery, food and more. And, you know what else you can get at a Daiso?

….

An unassuming yet incredibly useful tool. The portable whiteboard!

The Whiteboard Method

I use these whiteboards daily at work for note-taking, and I’ve devised a simple method that anyone can adopt:

1. Create
2. Capture
3. Erase
4. Repeat

1. Create

Make your notes, write your tasks, add reminders. Use the space of the whiteboard to offload extra thoughts or to help you through the steps of solving a problem

2. Capture

Using your mobile phone, take a picture of the whiteboard from above. Be aware of where lights are above you, so that you don’t cast too many shadows on the whiteboard

3. Erase

Clear off things as needed, such as when you complete a task or when you just need more room. You don’t have to erase everything, especially if you need to preserve an important note or reminder to yourself.

On the other hand, it’s good to start again with a clean slate every so often

4. Repeat

Enjoy your reclaimed whiteboard space, you don’t need to be precious with the words or pictures you’ve created, all will be preserved in your phone’s picture gallery. Allow yourself to be free with the formatting, location, size and even style of what you create. You can find your flow and forget about the limits of what pen and paper can do

Benefits

• Space saving
  You don’t need to have stacks of paper or piles of notebooks taking up space in your work area. There’s no need to create an archive or filing system, you just browse your phone’s image gallery which is automatically sorted by date and time already.
• Simple and functional
  The blank canvas of the whiteboard doesn’t guide you in a particular direction like most notebooks do, it’s only limitations are the size of the whiteboard and the fineness of the markers you can get. Your brain won’t worry about keeping words between the lines or making a mistake, you don’t have to get it ‘right’ or ‘perfect.’
• Cheap
  A whiteboard, a pack of coloured markers and a small eraser can be bought for under $10 AUD.

Tips and tricks

Cloud Storage

Install a photos app on your phone that automatically backs up your photos to the Cloud. I use Google Photos for this which can be used for free with unlimited storage*.

*The unlimited free photos option limits the quality of photo uploads to 16 Megapixels

As a nice bonus, Google Photos can recognise whiteboard images if you search for them

Colour coding

Do yourself a favour and pick up a pack of different coloured markers. You can assign roles to each colour such as headings, diagrams, important notes or even to separate topics

Dates

Place a date in one of the corners where it won’t get in the way of your notes. That way, you’ll have a good sense of when you took the notes, even if you take a picture of them days-later. I also found this to be helpful when I reviewed my whiteboard galleries, it helped my memory to connect the whiteboard content to my past experiences

Rotation

When taking pictures of your whiteboard from overhead, it’s very common for the phone’s orientation to still be in portrait mode, meaning your photo will end up rotated when you go to look at it later

Be mindful of your phone’s orientation when capturing whiteboard pictures, but there are also easy ways to fix rotation of the pictures later on. When looking at the pictures on Google photos, click on a picture to zoom it to your screen, then press shift+r on your keyboard to quickly rotate 90 degrees

Wrap up

Before I started using whiteboards, I wrote notes on plain sheets of A4 paper. I got fed up with storing and organising sheets as well as not being able to easily erase and reorganise the notes that I took.

I found that whiteboards freed me to concentrate more on my work and now I have many whiteboards around my desk and at home.

I hope you find this useful, and I welcome you to leave a comment about your note-taking methods or what you think of this method.

Thanks for reading :)

And it’s not just because of the tasty, fluffy rice it makes

1. The happy tune that it plays when it turns on and when the rice is done

Appliances with personality are the most fun kinds of appliances

2. The cute, round shape

They could’ve made it boxier or slimmed it down to its essential frame, but the makers gave it a friendly appearance that gives off the impression that it will happily do its job while you prepare the rest of your food

3. Its fuzzy logic cooking process

Under the hood, the rice cooker makes sure to manage the cooking process so that the rice cooks evenly, it makes up for any minor mistakes with the water to rice ratio too

4. Cleaning it is a breeze

A quick wipe over of the casing, a rinse of the bowl and a bit of love and care to clean up any marks and it’s clean!

5. The rice it cooks is awesome and eating it makes me happy

Having one crucial part of the cooking process taken care of lets me spend time on adding more fun ingredients to my meals

Some people have a car that they look after like a child, others have wonderful collections of rare items. I have my rice cooker and my life wouldn’t be the same without it.

The Story

It’s 7:00PM and I’m one of the last few people in the office. I’m used to searching the area, turning off the lights and locking up everything before I wander home, but tonight … didn’t quite go to plan.

My colleague Mike* was going to be walking the same direction home as me so I rush through the usual checks that I do, not wanting to keep him waiting too long. Along the way I say goodbye to a few stragglers who kindly turn off some of the lights behind them.

With all the preparations done, Mike and I triumphantly walk up to the alarm
# *beep*
# *beep*
# *beep*
# *beep*
ON … *beep beep*
“Unsealed on 16” appears on the display and immediately we realise that something must be wrong. This is where my thought patterns went in the wrong direction.

To give some context:

• I don’t like making mistakes
• I’ve locked up the office countless times before
• I was with my colleague who I respected and I look up to
• I wanted to prove that I’m a capable person by assuring my colleague that I’d checked everything
• I assumed that others had done some of the checks for me as they left their areas
• I didn’t think that I caused the problem

What I had in front of me was a colleague who wanted to go home, an obscure error message and some red herrings. You see, the alarm was outputting odd characters on its display and I jumped to the conclusion that the alarm was malfunctioning. I didn’t want to accept that it was actually my own fault that the alarm was, in fact, very helpfully pointing out.

The first action that Mike and I took together was to call up a senior employee for advice. It’s a very reasonable action but we both felt bad for interrupting them during their downtime after work. The very useful insight we got from the senior however was to check everything again.

So what was the problem? An out of the way door had been left open. I close the door, we try the alarm again and it happily arms itself.

The lesson

Thinking about this in my break time the day after I realised that Mike and I didn’t need to blindly ask for help and I didn’t need to be so stubborn that I was right.

The decision I wanted to make was to take my time, check things properly and make sense of the situation instead of placing the problem on something or someone else.

Lastly, I don’t need to feel helpless when I’m the youngest in the room, I can step up and assert my responsibility.

*Names have been given fictional counterparts