Tech

For quick reminders and can’t-miss memos, sticky notes are effective tools, and I’d argue that the simplicity of the sticky note is its best attribute. But the ease behind propping up sticky notes also means that it’s easy for people to find their desks covered in the things, making it difficult to glean critical information quickly.

Rocketbook, a Boston-based company that also makes reusable notebooks, thinks it has a solution for sticky note overload in the form of an app that interprets handwriting and organizes reusable sticky notes. But not everyone has the need—or time—for a dedicated sticky notes app.

Rocketbook’s Reusable Sticky Notes

Like Rocketbook’s flagship notebooks, its Reusable Sticky Notes rely on erasable pens that allow you to use the paper repeatedly. The Reusable Sticky Notes work with the Rocketbook app (available for iOS or Android), which transforms the sticky notes into images that are automatically stored in the app and can be emailed to specified people (as a PDF) or shared with third-party apps.

The $30 starter kit I used comes with weeks’, if not months’, worth of materials: That includes 15 3×3-inch reusable sticky notes, a case for said notes, a small microfiber towel for wiping the text off of the sticky notes, and a pen from Pilot’s FriXion line of erasable pens, markers, and highlighters. Rocketbook claims that any FriXion writing utensil will write and erase on its sticky notes. I only tried the pen included in the starter kit, a FriXion Ball gel pen with a 0.7 mm tip. Using the built-in eraser, I could usually remove enough ink from the notes so that only a faint imprint of what I wrote remained. For total clarity, I’d need to whip out the included microfiber cloth and some water. The notes seemed able to withstand water well and without getting flimsy.

Rocketbook claims that the adhesive on its sticky notes is so strong that they can be stuck and re-stuck hundreds of times. I didn’t get to put that to the test but can confirm that the notes’ adhesive area is thicker than that of a normal sticky note. The paper is thicker and smoother than a normal sticky note, too, while still being lightweight and comfortable enough to write on.

Sticky note software

The Reusable Sticky Notes are among the most technologically advanced scraps of paper you can find. In my experience, the technology, including the optical character recognition, worked reliably.

For example, scanning a sticky note was seamless. The camera in the iOS app quickly identified any sticky notes in the shot and snapped an image (or images) without me having to do much aligning or pressing more buttons.

Afterward, it was easy to share the image. I could send it to frequently used emails I saved in the app or send it to other apps, like AirDrop, Google Drive, ToDoist, or a search engine. The app can read the sticky note images as text, but it doesn’t convert the images to text. So, while Google could interpret an image of a sticky note as text via Google Lens, for example, ToDoist only saw a JPEG.

The app uses optical character recognition to convert handwriting into machine-readable text. This enables you to use the app to search uploaded sticky notes for specific words or phrases. I initially feared that the app wouldn’t be able to read my cursive, but even when I scribbled quickly and deviated from writing in a straight line, the app understood my writing. Don’t expect it to pick up chicken scratch, though. My handwriting didn’t need to be perfect for the app to understand it, but the app couldn’t comprehend my sloppiest notes—the type that only I could read, or ones that are common when someone is quickly jotting something on a sticky note.

Further, I didn’t always notice which notes I wrote neatly enough for the app to read. That made it confusing when I searched for terms that I knew I wrote on scanned notes but that were scrawled, per the app, illegibly.

Perhaps most useful for sticky note aficionados is the app’s ability to quickly group sticky notes. Sure, you could put sticky notes with to-do list items on the left side of your computer monitor and place notes with appointments to remember on the right side of your monitor. However, the app offers superior organization by letting you add tags to each scanned note. Then, it’s easy to look at all notes with the same tag on one page. But because each scanned note shown on a tag page is shown as a thumbnail, you can’t read everything written on all notes with the same tag simultaneously. That’s a con for people who prefer seeing all relevant notes and their contents at once.

There are additional ways that the Rocketbook app can help bring order to workstations containing so many posted sticky notes that they look like evidence boards. Typically, I denote titles on sticky notes by trying to write the title larger than the rest of the text and then underlining it. In the Rocketbook app, you can manually add titles to each sticky note. Alternatively, if you physically write “##” before and after the title on the actual Sticky Note, the app will automatically read the words in between the pound signs as a title and name the image as such. This is a neat trick, but I also found it distracting to have four pound signs written on my notes.

Another Reusable Sticky Notes feature lets you turn scanned notes into to-do lists that are accessible via the companion app. If you write a list on a note using square boxes at the start of each line, the app will read it as a “Smart List.” Once scanned, the app converts this into a to-do list with boxes that you can check off as you complete tasks. This is easier than trying to check off items on a sticky note that’s, for example, dangling on your computer screen. But it’s not always possible to fit every to-do list item on one line. And numerous times, the app failed to read my Smart List properly, as you can see in the gallery below. This could be due to my handwriting being unclear or misaligned. But as someone merely trying to write down a to-do list quickly, I lack the time or patience for thorough troubleshooting.

Organizing your organizational tools

Sticky notes can help you stay on schedule, but it’s easy to accumulate so many that the memos become a distracting crutch rather than handy organizational tools. For people who live by sticky notes, Rocketbook’s solution is excellent for grouping related tasks, appointments, and reminders and preventing things from getting overlooked.

However, leveraging Reusable Sticky Notes to their maximum potential requires scanning notes into the app. This doesn’t take long, but it is an extra step that detracts from the instant gratification of writing something down on a note and slapping it somewhere visible. For people who just like to write it down and post it, the Rocketbook app can feel cumbersome and unnecessary. The problems I had using Smart Lists hindered the product’s helpfulness, simplicity, and productivity as well.

Rocketbook’s sticky notes are also more beneficial to people who are more likely to look at an app on their phone than a bunch of papers surrounding them. There’s also a distinct advantage to being able to read your notes via an app when you’re not near the physical pieces of paper. Going further, it would be beneficial if the app could further leverage the phones that it’s on by being able to set alarms, for example, to correspond with scanned notes.

Much like with their app-free counterparts, for me, the best part of Rocketbook’s Reusable Sticky notes lies within its simpler features. The ability to easily reuse notes is more helpful than the ability to catalogue and archive memos. And while the handwriting recognition was mostly impressive, it seems more advantageous in something like a reusable notebook than a sticky memo.

But if you find yourself drowning in crumpled, flailing pieces of sticky paper, Rocketbook offers an option for organizing your organizational tools.