3×5 Cards

November 28th, 2006 Sean Murphy

Here’s a good tip–but stop me if you’ve already heard this one.

Always carry 3×5 cards with you wherever you go. I keep a handful in my shirt pocket and jot down those sudden inspirations or solutions to small problems that I would otherwise quickly forget. As Francis Bacon advises:

“Write down the thoughts of the moment.
Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.”

Here are some other uses I often put them to

• At least once a week I meet someone who has forgotten or run out of business cards, and I jot down their coordinates on one (this also avoids the “business card roulette problem” where you give away one of our business cards that you used to write someone else’s contact info on).
• I take notes on conversations: I am forced to focus on essentials in one fifth the space (15 square in. vs. perhaps 75 in an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper with 1/2″ all around).
• I record the license plates, make and model of cars with their lights on, this allows me to leave the card with a receptionist or hostess.
• I annoy my friends with PDA’s with my embrace of obsolete technology.

I picked up this trick shortly after I started work at Monolithic Memories (original PAL company, later acquired by AMD) in February of 1984. I was hired for a new team chartered to help MMI get into the gate array business, initially by offering a “PAL Integrator.”

Although this was my fourth job, all of my earlier ones had been at small companies, and MMI was spread across three buildings that included a semiconductor fab. My first few weeks were spent with another recent hire in an 8×8 cube in an office area of the fab waiting for a new building to be completed. I was amazed at one point when the fire alarm went off and people dropped everything and ran out of the building. I was used to alarms being tests or false: no one had taken them seriously. Milling about in the parking lot I asked someone “what’s the big deal?” He explained that there were a number of gases and liquids in the fab that you didn’t really want to come into contact with–for example arsine gas, which was both flammable and highly toxic–and the fire alarm did double duty as a gas leak indicator.

Between two in a cube and the newly realized possibility of sudden death I wasn’t sure that I had made the right career move. But things got better when a new co-worker transferred in from product engineering: Tom Tierney. Tom had been recruited by the director to help our newly formed CAD group–all of us new hires except for him–take advantage of the existing knowledge inside the company. In hindsight this was a very clever move, it gave us someone who had wide access inside the company, and it gave Tom a chance to learn a lot about software tools and design flows (this was 1984: MMI was using CALMA workstations, light tables to check chip connectivity, and hand drawn schematics).

Product engineers are trouble shooters and Tom did a lot of business on the go, questioning employees and vendors both to piece together the root cause of a particular problem and to locate one or more folks who might have the expertise to help us solve it. I noticed he always carried these blank three by five cards with him, to take notes and jot down ideas and observations.

I was carrying a lab notebook, but as I watched Tom in a conversation with a third party, I realized that taking quick notes on a 3×5 didn’t create the psychological distance that whipping out an 8-1/2 x 11″ lab notebook did. And taking notes encouraged people to talk and to think through what they were telling him because he was not just paying attention, he was taking notes. A lot of these conversations were conducted in a hallway, over a cup of coffee, at a lunchbreak, or many times over a beer. He could easily carry a dozen 3×5 cards in his upper shirt pocket and quickly make a few key notes (or refer to them if he needed to refresh his memory).

After a few months I started to carry 3×5’s, but where Tom had preferred white cards that were blank on both sides, I would by the packs that had four colors and lines so that I could assign a color to a project or a period of time (and I found it easier to write on the lines, now that the graph paper versions of 3×5’s are available, I use them almost exclusively).

Merlin Mann has suggested you clip a number of 3×5’s together and carry them in your back (hip) pocket. But I am not as enthusiastic about that approach, compared to the front shirt pocket. I carry my wallet in my front pants pocket so that I don’t sit on it, and I have much less back trouble.

Entry Filed under: EDA, Rules of Thumb, Tools for Startups