My wife gave me a re:Markable device for my birthday, and I’ve (mostly) integrated it into my system. I tried to replace all the notebooks I have with this one device. It will reduce clutter and simplify recording information. I have boxes of notebooks, so this is a big deal. The notebooks I have fall into these buckets:
- Subject notes
- Daily Journal
- “Specialty” journals
- Story ideas / project notes
- Sketchbooks
(1) and (4) were replaceable with no issues. I get the benefit of writing notes long-hand and in addition, with the OCR that re:Markable supplies, I can make digital versions of these notes (or sections of them) easily.
(5) was replaceable with some issues. Sketching with the stylus wasn’t as easy or satisfying as pen and paper. But I can’t draw for anything anyway, so my sketches looked pretty much the same on either media.
(2) and (3) are going to have to stay physical. I found that an important use case for these journals was to flip back look over previous entries. I often didn’t know which entry I was looking for, so I would just flip and scan. This is much faster (for me) using a physical notebook than having to step through each page of the digital notebook.
My current process is to use the re:Markable device, organized via the PARA method, to handle the subject notes. From there I will distill those into refined notes that go into Obsidian.
However – for Christmas I received a (physical) notebook which is set up for some sort of Zettlekasten system. I’ve begun using this for subject notes, which then feed into Obsidian.
I realize that these two systems are redundant, and this dilutes the “simplify recording information” benefit, but I am enjoying the variety here.
developerly.info 