I’m a big Remarkable user. I love the feel of it, the software, the abilty to have endless notebooks and docs and ebooks…
But I can’t shake the constant fear of tech obsolescence. It’s hard to relax into enjoying a tool when you know, deep down, that it could pretty much stop working tomorrow. Software dependencies etc.
The benefit of a paper notebook.
But I wonder if there’s a benefit to just using what you have, accepting that tools are finite, and enjoying it for what it is, in the moment.
Keen to hear thoughts on folks who use one or either.
I’ve heard of but am not familiar with the specifics of its workings. Are your notes available elsewhere should the device die? Is there a mechanism for backing up / exporting? And if so, is that backup/export in a proprietary format?
Remarkable tablets are cool. Love the idea of them and, from what little time I’ve spent using them, they’re nice.
I’ve not gotten one myself, though. Part of it is platform lock-in and wanting to use platform agnostic stuff (e.g. .txt files) as much as possible. Really, though, I just love fountain pens and nice notebooks.
I’m much more likely to grab those as I head out somewhere. And I enjoy all the attendant rituals like refilling ink, labelling journals and whatnot. So I stick with them. Gotta enjoy your tools.
I resonate with that fear. As knowledge workers we naturally identify a little with our work. The question I’ve frequently asked myself is do we truly own our work if we can’t do with it as we wish, or if the company can go out of business and render it practically inaccessible?
I don’t think we do. At this point I try to avoid systems without assured longevity or interoperability, and build my own tools and data formats that I can trust in. Partly for flexibility, but mostly to experiment with the potential future of a unified technological landscape.
We’ve resigned to this fragmented world of software, but I believe better is possible. In the optimal world, Remarkable wouldn’t establish yet another proprietary data format, but would talk the common language, and use the established data formats. It would adjust to the user, not vice-versa. It’s really this asymmetry, this lack of optionality to switch to another system, which is frustrating. Migrations are possible, but they’re not frictionless.
I really enjoy Kindle, though. Some tools are worth the lock-in. For now at least.
Paper can easily start to feel like another device that has to be managed. It’s just as easy to become overly attached to physical tools as digital ones. I went through a phase where I was constantly buying pens and stationery and trying various strategies like bullet journaling in an attempt to come up with the perfect system for capturing everything. Ultimately, it led nowhere, much like the attempt to manage it all in Obsidian, only with more unused notebooks to show for it. I also tried various methods for digitizing notes, scanning them into Rocketbook or using the iPad and Pencil, but these only introduced more friction. I was tempted to buy a Scribe during Prime Day, but I imagine the result would be the same.
And as much as I love the idea of using a Traveler’s Notebook as a wallet, it primarily serves as a wallet since it’s almost always faster and less cumbersome to just take out my phone. Amplenote is the easiest solution I’ve found for capturing ideas and tasks, but using the phone ,even with notifications off, can still lead to distraction and doomscrolling.
I’ve used the Freedom app to block apps and domains in the past, and I may set it up again. I’m not willing to go as far as buying a dumb phone, but I might try to make my iPhone as dumb as possible.
I had a similar relationship with fountain pens and Japanese stationery, but at one point, I lost the Vanishing Point I’d spent so much time dialing in to write exactly the way I wanted, and I had to ask myself whether I was fetishizing the tools and losing sight of what I had intended to use them for.
I get the feeling that you have too many devices. I use a notebook for all my thoughts in the moment. It sits at my desk in front of my keyboard and is used as a journal. If I’m not at my desk I’ll write something in my pocket notebook, which is a mix of stuff I have to get at the store music that seems interesting books and then some thoughts in the moment.
Despite the limitations of epaper devices (the good limitations of lack of distractions), I just don’t want to be on a device any more than I already am. I love sitting down without a device and writing in a notebook without any screens or possible distractions in my way. I don’t get to do it often, but getting away from the noise is excellent.
It’s easy to think that some new tech tool will fix a problem we didn’t know we had, but pen and paper has worked for generations. Remember the Lindy Effect, if it’s worked for a long time it’s more likely to continue to work or be popular than some new thing.
Yeah, I feel that (and I’ve asked myself similar Qs about a bunch of things). With pens and paper, though, I’ve just decided to say “nah” and let myself enjoy them as well-crafted things as well as tools. Gotta have some frivolity.
I’ve put all my devices except my laptop and my phone on ice. Bought some Field note notebooks. Going analogue for the next month. I think it’ll do me good.
I’m attempting to do the same, with only events that require a reminder being transferred to the phone. The major benefits so far come from using a small notebook and being able to write only half as fast as I can type. I’m forced to decide what’s important today instead of brain dumping dozens of tasks to be completed at some imagined time in the future.
I bought and used every model or remarkable since the very first one to the paper pro with color display last year.
It has the same advantage as paper notebooks (no harsh light, no cognitive overload, natural hand writing) but the ability to load pdfs for review with handwritten comments is wonderful … and you never run out of pages for journaling
I think what stops me from having a remarkable is the size of the thing - if it’s as big as an A4 sheet of paper I might as well just bring my computer since I’ll need the same bag size.
So I really like the concept, but I always fall back on having my eReader+ a tiny (A6) Notebook, since both can fit inside my cross body bag (I believe that’s the cool name for fanny pack nowadays)
I’ve tried tools like Remarkable and Daylight, but they don’t suit how my brain works. I think in a very spatial way, which is why I prefer paper maps to Google or Apple Maps. I also don’t want my work trapped in formats that become obsolete. Two years ago, after reading Derek Sivers’ article on using plain text files (Write plain text files | Derek Sivers), I switched to that approach and now have much more peace of mind. Plus, most of my work can be kept on a keychain, USB drive. Instantly transportable and discreet.
I respect Sivers and agree with most of what he’s saying here. I hate subscriptions and walled gardens, and obsolescence is a real concern.
But this reminds of me of when a friend who works as a developer was trying to convince me that I should use Org-Mode as a PKM. I guess if you are working in emacs all day then it makes sense, but trying to reshape your workflow to fit that is going to be a challenge otherwise.
Sivers assumes you are going to write python scripts to retrieve your notes or organize them into elaborate directory trees, but this falls apart as soon as you have to do anything on mobile devices.
I imagine he spends most of his day in front of a text editor like my friend. But this is going to be impractical for most. It’s also possible to get around some of the limitations he describes by using basic markdown. Obsidian and some other solutions will also allow you to keep all your files on your device without a subscription.
I think there are other legitimate reasons to avoid going down the second brain rabbit hole beyond these concerns, but I also don’t think I could ever manage tasks, events, and clippings via plain text. If your only use case is writing articles or keeping a journal, it’s probably more viable, especially if you’re already primarily working inside a text editor.
I owned a recording studio for years and carefully backed all the precious music up on RAID arrays in platform-agnostic wav files. Then I moved out of state, then COVID killed the business and the supply closet - who knows. I don’t know where all those files wound up, and I may never hear that awesome track I made on kitchen pots and pans again.
But the whole time I ran that studio, the insurance shop across the street was going out of business and these trucks with paper shredders would pull up and just shred filebox after filebox of physical paper. Everything. I guaratee the business owners didn’t know what it all was; they no longer cared.
So it’s all temporary right? Locked out by obsolecense, disappeared in a bad filing system or actually destroyed by fire or flood or rot.
I love my Remarkable, and it’s slightly easier to find and search old files there than in the giant file cabinet in my closet. I take notes all day every day, and the Remarkable has decluttered my space and mind a lot.
But I’m under no illusions that I’ll read or use most of these handwritten notes again. Handwritten helps me think but has a short life; laptop helps me polish gems and has a longer life. None of it’s forever.
I use Obsidian, but not in the usual “second brain” or PKM way. Everything I write is saved as markdown files inside Obsidian — it’s simple and easy to search. Obsidian for me is hyper minimalist, bare-boned, literally a place to write and link to relevant notes etc.
Since I’m on a Mac, I also use an app called HoudahSpot. Tiago Forte once made an interesting point about modern search: with how fast and precise it is, you could theoretically forget about tagging or using folders altogether, just throw everything into one big folder and still find what you need.
I’m not entirely sure how true that is, but it’s an intriguing idea. I use HoudahSpot to search for a specific plant name (what I write about), and it will go through absolutely every file on my computer, bringing out any reference to that plant. It’ll scan text files, Markdown files, PDFs, etc. - it’s search on steroids.
I take a lot of handwritten notes but prefer photographing and storing them digitally, never in the cloud. Recent events have shown why that’s wise. I keep backups on hard drives, though they too can degrade. I’m not that bothered with cross-device syncing as I try and stay off my phone. And only do my work on my laptop.
When I deleted over tens of thousands of photos, I didn’t miss a single one. Most of it was just digital clutter. The same goes for notes, they often feed my hoarding instinct more than they help.
That’s why I admired @joanwestenberg for deleting their Obsidian vault. It’s a reminder that sometimes what truly matters tends to resurface naturally, unless, of course, we lose that ability altogether. Thinking dementia here, being an old duffer myself.
I’ve been doing the same lately so I can extract the text and search through my various todo lists and brain dumps later. Although, admittedly, that hasn’t been as necessary as I imagined. It does allow me to avoid feeling like everything has to be centralized in a single notebook, since I can write on whatever I have, and it ends up in the same place. I can also write more freely if I’m going to throw out the hard copy and don’t have to worry about someone reading my notes without context if my bag were lost or I were killed in an accident (admittedly, I’d have bigger problems then).
I don’t know if I can tackle photos though. I used to try to pare down the photos I took with a DSLR to keep only the best ones, but as often as I’m taking photos with my phone now, that would become a daily chore.
Digital hoarding is probably an impulse worth reining in though. My local music library contains more music than I could listen to in a decade if I stopped downloading now. Ebooks present the same problem. At least you had to curate your shelf with physical books, but since it’s so easy to download without thinking, you end up having to dig through calibre to find the book you want among the thousands you’ve stockpiled.
The tendency to spend more time hoarding information than engaging with it is the core problem. I also found the Second Brain video to be somewhat of a revelation, as it was the first one from Joan that I encountered. She inspired me to let go of my bloated Obsidian vault, but I haven’t fully abandoned the tendency toward digital hoarding.
Even in hobbies that should provide an escape from this, I find myself hoarding tools and tutorials. In the case of music, it was getting to the point where I would open up ableton and spend more time digging through VSTs and samples than actually producing anything. Switching to mostly using a teenage engineering KO-II sampler, with its minimal effects and extremely limited storage, actually made it much easier to just create and have fun. Constraints win again.
I do think I have gone too far in the other direction though. Instead of having a music library, I just stream. I’ve been thinking about trying to start from scratch - buying actual music - building a carefully tended and curated library of music I actually care about.
I did find and reset my partner’s old iPod classic lately.
Might be a good starting point.
