The Best Sticky Notes: Experiment

Let's get right down to business here and address a very important item in the office: sticky notes. They are so small, and yet so critical; often subtle nearly to the point of invisibility if they are doing their work, while being a source of exasperation if they don't do their work and begin to fall down before you were ready to be through with the note! And at other times they are the star of the show, depending on what use they're being put to. So it is clearly important to have quality sticky notes! Bad sticky notes that fall down too soon make me crazy. We should not have to reinforce sticky notes with tape y'all! (Sticky notes in weird colors is a whole 'nother issue, which I will sidestep for the sake of brevity.)

I don't know about you, but I am always getting office supplies sales reps contacting me who think they can save my company money. One of the ways they think they can save money for us is by selling us their off-brand sticky notes. By the time I was an office manager and responsible for making sticky note decisions for dozens of people, I'd already noticed that some of them just suck, so I was skeptical. 3M's Post-Its always stood out to me in terms of quality, but I decided to get scientific about it. If I'm going to make a far-reaching decision like this (ha!) I like to do it with evidence on my side! Some of the other brands are cheaper, so I wanted to be sure that, if I spent extra for top-of-the-line sticky notes it would be worth it!

So when one office supplies rep gave me a free sample of some non-3M sticky notes, I decided to test them to see just how long they would stick. I did the test with two notes initially: 3M Post-Its and the Business Source sticky notes the rep was trying to tell me were a "good alternative". I used the 3x3 inch size of each. I stuck one of each on my cube wall, which is fabricy, and one of each on a clean area of my white board. For my methodology, I was allowed to press the notes back down if the corners started to peel up, but otherwise I didn't interfere at all (no moving the notes, water tests, etc.).

The notes stuck on the fabric both fell down pretty quickly, so I didn't get any good data there. The good data came from the sticky notes on my whiteboard. After a few months I got another free sample and decided to add it to the mix. It's not totally scientific, but I figured it would still give me good information!

Sticky Notes Test

Results
Business Source - 11/15/11-12/8/11 - 23 Days
3M Post-It - 11/15/11-Present - 13 Months, 24 Days (and counting)
Staples - 8/20/12-Present - 4 Months, 18 Days (and counting)

As I suspected, 3M and their Post-Its are a clear winner. I was somewhat surprised, though, that the Staples branded notes are also doing well! The Business Source notes stuck for a paltry three weeks and two days, definitely unimpressive. I'll grant that there is a possibility I just got a bad batch (this was a small-scale study, obviously), but still. I call shenanigans on the claim that these would be a quality alternative to 3M's Post-Its!

How about you, have you done any sticky-note testing, scientifically or unscientifically? I'd love to hear about it!

I'll be sure to keep you posted (haha!) if one of these sticky notes falls down or if I get any other samples to add into the race.

Update: I posted an update on this ongoing experiment here!