When the office closed in 2020 I told myself that the whiteboards were one of the things I wouldn't miss. The digital tools were better anyway. Miro had infinite canvas. FigJam had sticky notes and voting. We could collaborate asynchronously, across timezones, without anyone's handwriting being a problem.
Two years later I realized I had stopped thinking visually almost entirely. I was writing everything in docs. My thinking had gotten more linear and more verbose. I was producing more words and fewer ideas.
The thing I hadn't understood about the office whiteboard was how much of its value was private. Yes, you use it in meetings. But the more important moments were the other kind — standing in front of the board alone with a problem, drawing and erasing, working something out before you had to explain it to anyone. That's the thing you can't replace with Miro. Miro is for sharing. The board is for thinking.
I put a board in my home office in late 2022. A proper one, not a tiny desktop version. Floor-to-ceiling on one wall. My wife thought I was overcommitting to the bit. She was wrong.
Within a month my thinking had changed. I was drawing problems before writing about them. I was finishing design docs faster because the hard thinking had already happened on the board. I was coming into meetings with clearer positions because I'd already worked through the alternatives visually.
The digital tools are still there and I still use them for the things they're actually good at — sharing diagrams, capturing output, collaborating async. But the board is where the thinking happens. I don't think I understood that distinction clearly until I went four years without it.