3M Post It Flags 1"x1 3/4" Red 50 Flags/Dispenser MMM6801
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Make Mine Purple!
Pros
Versatile, durable organizing tool that has proved to be a boon for publications professionals
Cons
Pricey, given their substance
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Post-It Flags save the pages of documents from becoming tattered and torn by improvised markers, and they provide a versatile organizing tool based on color coding.
It's been 13 years since I encountered my first Post-It Flag. I was on business travel as part of a team conducting health and safety reviews at a government site. My job was to facilitate the preparation of a field draft for the inspection team's report. The draft would be left behind when we departed the site and required a reasonable measure of editorial completion.
Given our team's mandate, "We're from the Government, and we're here to help you," our host facility graciously turned me loose on the supply cabinet—which is where I made my memorable discovery. Post-It Flags resonated with my psyche from the very first sight. I just knew this was a product I would love. Those early Post-It Flags came in yellow, red, blue, orange, green, white, or purple—with purple instantly becoming my color of choice.
Sized out at 1 by 1.7 inches, standard flags were (and still are) made of a thin plastic film. One end of the flag has a field of color, while the other is coated with a thin layer of 3M's "not-so-sticky" adhesive. The flags typically come in small plastic dispensers containing 50 colorful strips that pop out one at a time to facilitate ease of use. The user, in turn, is able to affix the flag on the page edge of a document, allowing a bright overhang of color to mark the location. This simple function means that publications specialists and reviewers need no longer use paper clips or tattered dog-ears to mark areas of concern within a document. They can simply affix a brightly colored tag and, voila, the page is marked for whatever attention it may require.
Like 3M's Magic Tape, which long ago taught us that we could write of "frosted" plastic, 3M&'s Post-It Flags can be written upon. This functionality invites all manner of inscriptions—everything from "Sign Here," to "Fire the idiot who wrote this," to my favorite editorial comment: "Huh?" These days, the Post-It folks provide users with a whole host of pre-inscribed flags, but for me, nothing is quite so satisfying as coming up with my own carefully contemplated messages.
The fact that flags are available in multiple colors and sizes expands their usefulness dramatically during draft review cycles. The precise dynamics depend on the work environment, the project, and/or the user, as demonstrated by the following examples:
▪ On some projects, a specific color might be assigned to each team member (I'm purple, of course), a process that provides a "flag trail" back to each identified concern and to its associated author.
▪ In other situations, different colors might be used to identify different categories of evaluation criteria: blue for technical content, green for policy concerns, yellow as an alert to check on a particular fact, red to raise a security question, and purple (can you doubt it?) for editorial issues.
▪ On still other occasions, color may be used to assign priority for the inclusion of information within a particular document, in which case the standard meanings for red, orange, yellow, blue, and green easily carry the day—and purple is still available for editorial concerns.
For the economy-minded among us, it should be noted that Post-It Flags are durable and reusable. Even many of those that have been written upon can potentially have a second life. (Every document contains a few passages worthy of my trademark "Huh?" inquiry.) Two or three "lives" per flag constitute the reasonable expectation for this practice. During times of economic distress, I have been known to populate my monitor or some other designated location in my workspace with a repository for flags recovered from documents and destined for reuse. Small splashes of color thus brighten my day—and consequently my attitude.
I regret that in this era of increased productivity facilitated by the hours we spend in front of our computer monitors, opportunities to make use of Post-It Flags are not what they were. Many functions we once performed routinely on hard copy have been bypassed for direct input into electronic files. The result, in my opinion, is often a diminished quality in the written word. Some documents, however, are still important enough or visible enough to encourage doing things the old-fashioned way. When that happens, watch out! The purple flags are likely to be mine.
? DAnneC/BawBaw, 2005
Given our team's mandate, "We're from the Government, and we're here to help you," our host facility graciously turned me loose on the supply cabinet—which is where I made my memorable discovery. Post-It Flags resonated with my psyche from the very first sight. I just knew this was a product I would love. Those early Post-It Flags came in yellow, red, blue, orange, green, white, or purple—with purple instantly becoming my color of choice.
Sized out at 1 by 1.7 inches, standard flags were (and still are) made of a thin plastic film. One end of the flag has a field of color, while the other is coated with a thin layer of 3M's "not-so-sticky" adhesive. The flags typically come in small plastic dispensers containing 50 colorful strips that pop out one at a time to facilitate ease of use. The user, in turn, is able to affix the flag on the page edge of a document, allowing a bright overhang of color to mark the location. This simple function means that publications specialists and reviewers need no longer use paper clips or tattered dog-ears to mark areas of concern within a document. They can simply affix a brightly colored tag and, voila, the page is marked for whatever attention it may require.
Like 3M's Magic Tape, which long ago taught us that we could write of "frosted" plastic, 3M&'s Post-It Flags can be written upon. This functionality invites all manner of inscriptions—everything from "Sign Here," to "Fire the idiot who wrote this," to my favorite editorial comment: "Huh?" These days, the Post-It folks provide users with a whole host of pre-inscribed flags, but for me, nothing is quite so satisfying as coming up with my own carefully contemplated messages.
The fact that flags are available in multiple colors and sizes expands their usefulness dramatically during draft review cycles. The precise dynamics depend on the work environment, the project, and/or the user, as demonstrated by the following examples:
▪ On some projects, a specific color might be assigned to each team member (I'm purple, of course), a process that provides a "flag trail" back to each identified concern and to its associated author.
▪ In other situations, different colors might be used to identify different categories of evaluation criteria: blue for technical content, green for policy concerns, yellow as an alert to check on a particular fact, red to raise a security question, and purple (can you doubt it?) for editorial issues.
▪ On still other occasions, color may be used to assign priority for the inclusion of information within a particular document, in which case the standard meanings for red, orange, yellow, blue, and green easily carry the day—and purple is still available for editorial concerns.
For the economy-minded among us, it should be noted that Post-It Flags are durable and reusable. Even many of those that have been written upon can potentially have a second life. (Every document contains a few passages worthy of my trademark "Huh?" inquiry.) Two or three "lives" per flag constitute the reasonable expectation for this practice. During times of economic distress, I have been known to populate my monitor or some other designated location in my workspace with a repository for flags recovered from documents and destined for reuse. Small splashes of color thus brighten my day—and consequently my attitude.
I regret that in this era of increased productivity facilitated by the hours we spend in front of our computer monitors, opportunities to make use of Post-It Flags are not what they were. Many functions we once performed routinely on hard copy have been bypassed for direct input into electronic files. The result, in my opinion, is often a diminished quality in the written word. Some documents, however, are still important enough or visible enough to encourage doing things the old-fashioned way. When that happens, watch out! The purple flags are likely to be mine.
? DAnneC/BawBaw, 2005
