You know whats calm and not distracting? A notebook and pen. You can buy a LOT of decent notebooks for the price of one of the reMarkables mentioned in the article. (~30 or so?), and it will last a lot longer as well. Im starting to sound like a luddite.
I get you're being snarky, but I'll politely push back.
I remained skeptical for a long time. Then I got one. I absolutely love it. In particular, the ability to have multiple notebooks with me and cross-linking via tags. And "infinite pages" lets you insert space in the middle of a page or continue moving down without having to worry about physical page sizes. I can also screen-share the tablet with the desktop app to draw diagrams on zoom calls.
Admittedly, it is only incremental over a spiral notebook and a bic pen. But they do that incremental thing pretty well, particularly because of their focus on the "calm tech" aspects and lack of mainstream ecosystem to track upstream.
I had the opposite experience. I am an avid note taker, love the idea of a remarkable and got one for all the benefits you mentioned, especially the screen share part and just found it unsatisfying. Couldn't stick with it, wound up sending it back and going back to pen and paper
Obligatory mention that the Luddites weren't against technology in general, they were against technology that was causing them to lose their livelihoods (while the country was already in the midst of an employment crisis and economic downturn due to a trade war (and real war) with Napoleon's Europe).
My paper notebooks can't do linking, I can't easily rearrange pages, rearrange my notes on the page, and getting it off my paper and into my work PC is more challenging. My Kindle Scribe is excellent for all of this, and I can't go back, personally!
There are of course pen-and-paper approaches to all of these.
Links in text are called references. These can be internal within a document or codex, or external, referencing third-party works. Either case is far less subject to linkrot than URLs have turned out to be.
One of the killer concepts of a bullet journal is the use of indices and spreads to provide an interlinked and searchable reference. If you go back in time, there are numerous journal and commonplace book organisational schemes.
Pages can be easily rearranged using a removeable binding (three-ring binder or various other options), or by using an unbound format such as index cards (the original database solution).
Data can be entered into a computer through scanning and handwriting recognition, though this is admittedly slow, cumbersome, and inexact. On the other hand, you may want friction between your paper-based and electronic data systems.
> Either case is far less subject to linkrot than URLs have turned out to be.
I do not mean URLs, though, I mean locally linking from one page or notebook to another. It's internal references on steroids, and is much more useful to me than my collection of paper notebooks and references were
I'm a BuJo afficionado too! I'm still adapting it to my e-ink note-taking system, starting to get there via folders and notebooks instead of one big notebook, and its exactly why internal linking is so useful!
In a BuJo: list the page you want to reference. I also create several pages of initial index at the beginning of my BuJo, and generally put spreads at the back, working forward.
That way the BuJo reads as: index, calendrical pages, spreads/references (at the end).
The advantages are non-electronic storage with ready reference. You can only access the current year's BuJo generally (unless you're where your archive is kept), but current references should be readily available on you (e.g., addresses, current information, calendar, etc.). You can only lose the current journal should you misplace it, and the information won't leak out readily as it can from digital storage.
For an index-card system, look up Zettelkasten if you haven't already. Very robust and useful indexing systems have been at the heart of academic and commercial research for over two centuries now, and the systems developed are quite powerful. Digital systems are more powerful still, but have their own downsides: loss or corruption, data exfiltration, and devices which may not be convenient to use in all circumstances.
With a BuJo or Zettelkasten, information capture is possible by carrying a few index cards with you and jotting notes. You have capture, can file these into your journal (or an indexing system, or a loose-leaf binding), and don't risk losing the rest of your archive in the process. The lack of digital distractions is its own powerful benefit.
>I can't easily rearrange pages, rearrange my notes on the page
okay. so don't do those things.
for me, that's what "calm tech" is all about - it's not just notifications and distractions, it's all the desire for more features, and for software to solve all problems. sometimes we can just not have features, and keep some problems, instead of trading our problems for the problems that more features bring.
You’re better at writing than I am then! I make mistakes all the time, so being able to move my words around on the page is super useful.
This to me is calm tech, because that’s all it does: note taking. If your definition is such that only pen and paper meets it, that’s not a very useful definition for tech IMO
I hope either Amazon or Remarkable come out with a 13" e-paper tablet. I want to be able to read and mark up A4 sized pdfs. The Fujitsu Quaderno is out there, but it feels semi-abandoned.
FWIW the Boox devices are good and are in the 13" space, but my annoyance with them is 1) Android and 2) I broke the screen on my Boox Note 2, and there is no way to repair it, even a screen replacement is impossible apparently, so YMMV.
Yeah totally fair on both points. I'd bought the Note 2 before I'd heard about the GPL violations... Android is funnily enough exactly why I went back to the Kindle with the Scribe instead, though Amazon has it's faults as well. My ideal device for this space would be the reMarkable Paper Pro but with the Kindle app for reading books installed :)
With the usual trade-offs between pen and notebook: namely durability and storage, for me. Some can account for all their notebooks going back years. I cannot, which makes me sad to have lost a lot of writing.
I have observed a strange/alarming behaviour when I carry a notebook - because friends and family don't typically have one, they find it intriguing and so will sometimes absentmindedly snoop through what I've written if I leave it unattended. The same thing just doesn't happen with a ReMarkable (and even if it did, you can set a PIN code).
> and so will sometimes absentmindedly snoop through what I've written if I leave it unattended
I'm glad I'm not the only one who experienced that! Such a fascinating experience, though really quite upsetting at the time. Doesn't happen now with my PIN-locked e-ink device.
