So I finally made the decision to purchase and try out the reMarkable e-Ink tablet. A lot of people who know me can attest that one of my biggest nightmares is trying to stay organized, especially when I have a lot of stuff flying at me.
I’ve always had that trouble, going all the way back to 1st grade, and one of the biggest nightmares for me was always to keep organized when it comes to notes – handwritten notes especially.
At one point, I thought a laptop would help, but there came a few problems with laptops. First, they tent to have keyboards that are not always handled well by my rather large hands. Second, there tends to be more distraction with things like computers and tablets with browsers. It’s hard sometimes to stay focused if you know there is something that can provide a distraction readily, and that’s never a good thing.
Regular tablets and laptops, too, have the negative effect of causing you to suffer the effects of trying to read stuff that is essentially printed on a light bulb. After a while, I get eye strain, headaches, etc.
The alternative, reams of paper that are easily lost, confused or end up with intermixed content, just tends to make me a mess after a while. Not to mention, what I end up with after a while are 30 sheets of dates for meetings with a few scattered notes in between… after a while, I have a mess of papers to sort through looking for what the heck I’m supposed to be working on.
For a number of years I had a classic-styled Kindle reader from Amazon. And something I learned from that was: e-Ink is fantastically easy on the eyes and the low power consumption means my device can last for weeks on a single charge. While it doesn’t help with complex graphics and the like, the fact is, if I’m talking about daily notes taken in meetings or discussions with co-workers, that’s not really a problem.
A couple years back I saw a KickStarter campaign for an e-Ink tablet that included a stylus, allowing for note taking, sketching and organizing. I was intrigued. As much as the price tag was high, it definitely resonated that a single device with about 6 – 8 GB of memory might be able to provide an answer to organizing lots of paper notes that eventually get too messy to keep track of.
Finally, last week, I decided to bite the bullet and get one. At the very least, I would write it off on my taxes and that wasn’t a total waste, but if things I’d read about it and a serious desire to organize kicked in, it might end up being an extremely beneficial thing to have.
So day 1 – obviously it’s too early to say it’s paid for itself, but I will say, it was nice to carry this into my meeting rather than a ratty pad of paper, and have my notes organized for one meeting, separately from my notes for other projects, and to-do-lists, and random doodles… and no eye strain from using it.
As time goes on, I will post some updates on how the tools is working out, and I’ll let you know how I feel about this tool.
Forewarning: if you want one, be prepared for a bit of initial sticker shock. They are about $500.00. Still, if organization is my goal and I put in my efforts to using this properly, that might be a worthwhile expenditure ultimately.
Time will tell.
If you’re interested, here’s the link to the reMarkable tablet home.