| I use pen and paper for the majority of my journals and a Remarkable 2 for some. I find writing long-hand works best for me. It's slower and that's the point of it. The journey is the process and the goal. The end result is clear, well-formed thoughts. You cannot rush the process to get the end result faster: you'll end up with a jumble of short-hand, bullet points, and half-baked ideas. I also prefer a page. I can draw diagrams when it suits me. Software forces me to switch tools and my mental context to add diagrams. And they're all clunky besides. I'd rather something more intuitive that doesn't get in my way: a pen and perhaps a ruler, slide, etc on occasion. The Remarkable software has improved with time and with the addition of the keyboard I can get close to the best of both worlds. I tend to use it for work-focused and project-focused journals. I'll start with free-hand but use the text-conversion and clean things up from there. The free-hand diagramming is much improved now that they've introduced better drawing tools that can force straight shapes from my free-hand ones. And then you get the benefit of being able to search through your documents from a computer. For my paper journals I have to use a bookshelf and a box of index cards to keep everything organized. For the amount of journals I produce this is sufficient but it's not as convenient as it is on a computer... but personally I don't find I need to maximize convenience in my life, I'm satisfied with some processes and tasks being manual and tedious. I also like the paper journals because it leaves a physical legacy of my learnings, thoughts, and experiences. I like reading through them on occasion to recall some algorithm I learned years ago that I need to remember or some book I had read in order to recall the salient thoughts and quotes I found interesting. And I hope maybe some day my children or surviving colleagues will find them useful too. |