Spencer Silver, inventor behind the Post-it Note, has died

The article leaves out my favorite part of the Post-It Note story.

When Silver and Fry were trying to get 3M management to productize Post-It's, they could not get any traction with anyone with authority to launch a product. So, they made up a prototype batch in their lab, put some on the desk of every executive's secretary, with a note to call their department secretary if they wanted more. They gave their department secretary a supply and told her they would make more as needed. Soon she was getting orders from every secretary on the campus.

One day she came to them and said: "This has got to stop! I am spending all my time filling orders for these sticky notes and I can't get my job done!" So they told her to just stop. "We have enough data for our experiment now, so you can just stop and get back to your regular job."

I find that part of the story simply delicious.

Just a personal thank you to Dr. Silver.

My paternal grandmother's family was rooted near Cynthiana, KY and the 3M Post-It-Note factory brought a lot of prosperity and middle class jobs to this very rural outpost. My Uncle would always keep a pack of Yellow Post-Its to show "Made in Cynthiana" on the back, a sign that the little town he spent his life in brought something useful and ubiquitous to the world.

Of all the tools and productivity hacks that have been offered to me throughout my 15ish year career so far, there are two “tools” I use more than any other system:

1) A barely comprehensible email sent to myself as a reminder to do something.

2) A barely comprehensible note jotted on a post-it note and hung off the bottom of my monitor.

Thanks Spencer!

Have there been any must-have office tools (ie. staplers, post-it notes) that have been invented in the past 25 years? Similarly, are 3M and Georgia Pacific and whoever's R&D testing new products or just optimizing already established ones?