Turn Your Entire Office Into a Whiteboard

White tile/melamine/shower board works pretty well too. It ghosts a little bit, but it's ridiculously cheap, like $13 for 4' x 8'.

Yeah, this IdeaPaint stuff is $175 (!) for 50sf of coverage. It could cost several thousand to turn your office into what you're looking for.

Whereas tileboard is $12 for a 32sf chunk. So cheap that even if it does break down, it's still cheaper to replace it a dozen times rather than put up IdeaPaint.

Rustoleum makes a whiteboard paint that seems cheap, but you've actually got to layer it many times to get decent performance. And even then it's not that great.

We're going with the tileboard route at the coworking place I'm putting together here in Atlanta. Shameless plug: http://www.ignitionalley.com

I did this too, in my old home office. Cheap and worked great.

The reality is though, the more space I used to have whiteboard discussions with others, the harder it was to capture this information for later use. Nearly all of the time, a pad of paper or a smaller whiteboard was suitable for the conversation.

But it's crap in terms of performance. And you have to layer it many times to get it to work even decently. Those layers add up when you get down to it.

I can't speak to the paint, but I worked at a place with dry-erase wallpaper covering the middle 60% or so of the walls, left-edge to right-edge. There was never any problem with staining or degrading. It was truly awesome.

Here's a photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martincron/4033370404/

I "think" in diagrams, I use the whiteboard behind my desk to explain things to myself.

Try thinking a half million lines of C++ code into an existing enterprise architecture with a staff who's native language is not English in English without drawing a picture.

I agree with you. I've never really managed to use whiteboards effectively, and people who jump up to the whiteboard at every hint of trouble eventually get on my nerves.

It does not bother me any more than someone who is particularly animated with their body gestures or language when communicating an idea. Beside that having ideas written out in a shared space can be very useful when you are collaborating on a large project with many facets.

The main benefit I find from having something to draw on is the ability to talk about multiple things without blowing their/my working memory. Seven chunks gets used up pretty damn quick when you need to consider both the parts and the interactions.

I find spoken English (or any other language) remarkably ineffective when it comes to reasoning about more abstract concepts. Many of these concepts are much easier to describe and reason around in some sort of diagram and symbol shorthand. Even when just thinking to myself I often use a lot of internal visual representations of the concepts I'm thinking about.

Also leaving a visual trail of the development of your thoughts make it easier for others (and you) to follow and gives you something to refer back, rather than trying to remember a long chain of complicated arguments.

Personally I like using a whiteboard even when just reasoning out things for myself.

Sorry, was that somehow inappropriate?