Channeling your inner Martha Stewart: 17 novel ideas for how to re-purpose those business cards.

You’ve received that piece of card stock that tells you their name, title, email, and phone number.

They saved you those 30 seconds that it might take to write those things down on your phone.

And now, you’ve gotten home an hour later, and have taken 30 seconds to look at the card. And write those things down on your phone.

What do you with those wonderfully designed pieces of thick paper that you won’t use again?

Here’s 17 ideas:

1. Bookmarks. Especially if the cards were given by guys named Mark, with details about how you can book them for appointments (barber, massage therapist, etc.)
2. Tape a bunch of them to a white lab coat — for Halloween, you can go as a cardiologist.
3. Make them into a book of fictional writing prompts for game night — you have to write the life story, obituary, or classified ad of the person, based just on their card. Best one wins. Cards against Humanity meets LinkedIn.
4. Write your contact information in the blank spaces and reuse it the next time you meet someone else.
5. Make them into the next big thing — entrepreneur trading cards. Build your all-star founding team by collecting and exchanging with your friends. (“I’ve got 2 Blockchain developers and UX Designer. I just need a level 5 partnerships manager to complete my team!”) Sell them on eBay in 10 years when everybody gets nostalgic.
6. Put a handful of them in that bowl for the raffle at the happy to stack the odds in your favor. 1) Keep track of all the names that you use so you don’t forget to pick up the prize. 2) Don’t do it at an event where anybody knows your real name. Unless you promise them a share of the prize to keep quiet.
7. Get some tape and make placemats. Who said there’s no room for business at the dinner table?
8. Create a game of assassin, and assign each person one of the folks whose cards you have. Unlimited surprise water gun scenarios.
9. Make stencils for your micro-spray painting side gig.
10. Stack them together, put them in a box, pour resin, let dry, and use a lathe to make it into a cup or bowl. (Imagine the face you can make when you say, “Networking? I eat that s**t for breakfast.”)
11. Get some crazy metallic card? Line them on the back of your wifi router to maximize the signal in your home.
12. Going to an event and get asked for a card? Fill your card holder with a bunch of cards and say you ran out of yours, using those as evidence of your fake hardcore networking skills.
13. If you just can’t one night, use it as your alter-ego when you meet someone creepy you don’t want stalking you, so that they can’t email you to pick your brain over a coffee tomorrow.
14. If you have a pet mouse, or are trying to get rid of your unwanted pet mice, tape them to the floor to make a labyrinth-style maze to guide them to the treat/trap at the end.
15. Sneak them onto a colleague’s desk, and convince them over the time that they keeping meeting these people and forgetting.
16. Don’t travel much? Instead of marking of a map of countries you’ve traveled to, pin cards from as many states and countries as you can find.
17. Make a giant mosaic portrait of someone using colored cards.

Have any interesting additions? Leave them in the comments below, or shoot me a message on Twitter @mikemaccombie.