ReMarkable 2 - My impression

Hardware
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A few months ago, a friend upgraded from the reMarkable 2 (RM2) to the reMarkable Paper Pro. I asked if he had plans for the RM2, and after some thought he sold it to me for a very reasonable price.

I’m a Kindle Fan for reading of books (distraction free) and love eink and I’m someone who makes a lot of notes at my desk on paper while working because (beyond anything else) it’s usually quicker than opening the right app and writing something down.

I work in Compliance (Info Sec and Data Protection are my Major Focus) largely from home on a Windows computer which is locked down (rightly so) by our IT department. I have a couple of large monitors, spend a lot of time in Teams meetings or in Deep Work mode. I’m also very easily distracted. From 10am until 12noon every day, I take Email offline and quit Teams so I can focus.

All of my Projects and tasks live in OmniFocus on my MBA, this only gets accessed once a day during the week, plus my Weekly review on Friday afternoon.

For a while I’ve been a fan of closing out today and planning out tomorrow’s workload the day before (my daily review), and before the reMarkable, this happened in Obsidian, meeting notes were taken in Obsidian, either in my daily note or in a backlinked note. But I’d always have a pad of paper by my side to remind me to phone someone back or to make a note about something I needed to do when in the middle of something else.

This led to lots of things ending up on paper, needing to be brought back into my digital life, or persisting for a while which was a problem if I had to travel for work.

Gaining the reMarkable 2 led me to do a couple of things

  1. step back and take a good look at how I was using Obsidian; and
  2. consider whether this hybrid system was working for me.

This reflection led me to a couple of realisations

  1. I rarely look back at the notes made in Obsidian after that day, I’m not saying never, just rarely.
  2. Notes I write by hand tend to stick in my head far better

Now a couple of months later.

  • At the end of each day, I still plan out the following day in my Daily note, but now it happens on the RM2, this includes
  • 3 focuses for the day
  • at the start of the week I also add my 3 weekly focuses
  • At the bottom of my Daily note I have space to add anything (that crops up during the day) that needs doing on that day (e.g. Phone Bill back" or “send invoice for x to Finance”

Daily Note
Daily Note1388×1560 104 KB

The Second page of that notebook is for anything which is an action, but which doesn’t need doing today, at the end of each day these are added into OmniFocus or transferred to other notebooks (more on this below)

I also make RM “Notebooks” for each meeting planned for tomorrow and I already have a notebook for each person I have regular catchups with e.g. My Manager, my direct reports, Other colleagues I work with on a regular basis. If I think about something to talk about in one of these meetings, it goes on the Second page of my daily notes Notebook and is transferred into the relevant notebook at the end of the day.

Each Notebook on Remarkable can have many hundreds of pages. For recurring meetings and catchups with colleagues, after each meeting I create a new page and carry anything forward I need to.

At the end of the day I copy anything from my daily note which is undone into OmniFocus and erase all in that daily note, I then create my daily note for the following day.

The main reason I’ve been able to do this is that on a page in a notebook, you can have multiple layers.
On my Daily Note, I have 4 Layers

  • The Template (Headings and check boxes that persist at all times)
  • Long term (My 3 weekly goals)
  • Notes
  • There is also a layer which is the “ruled” lines
    This means that when I erase the Daily note at the end of each day, I’m only erasing the Notes layer which leaves everything else in tact.

The benefits for me have been massive

  1. I’m now paper freeeeeeeee. I disposed of many different paper pads I’d accumulated over the years to try and find the perfect one
  2. I get all of the benefits of Paper, but it’s backed up and available on my computers
  3. I feel more engaged in meetings
  4. I spend less time looking at backlit screens

I’ve not looked back, the only point of dread I have is that if the RM2 dies, the cost to replace it is considerable, but I suspect I’ll bite the bullet and pay it.

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Have you tried reading and annotating PDF files in the Remarkable?

This is my primary use case for an e-ink tablet. As my arthritis / RSI worsens it’s harder and harder to write on my iPad. I would prefer hardcopy, but have no spare room for anything.

I would like to mark up a .PDF on the Remarkable and then transfer/export it to my Mac for long term storage/use.

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I’m curious how this works for you. I’m in a similar position. I work from home, use a windows pc. I do have admin rights on it due to the nature of my job. I’m a data analyst and former programmer, so I have older apps to keep up to date and such - easier to do without asking IT to install things for me.

That said, any PHI or sensitive data in a third party app is a not go.

I often thought about maintaining a list of things in Todoist that I just type my project tasks into. So nothing sensitive - just “email fiscal year numbers to Joe Blow”, where Joe Blow is an employee.

But because I’m an analyst I have a lot of one off, shorter tasks to accomplish. I’ve tried the Todoist-on-the-side approach as Ms ToDo is :-1:, but I find it hard to keep track of all the tasks manually not having a link to the email as I would in MS Todo really slows me down.

But so does having my work and personal tasks split across Todoist and ToDo.

Do you just us Omnifocus for the high level project work or do you capture smaller one off tasks as well?

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Very, very helpful write up - thank you!

There are many ways where our work habits and needs are similar. One big difference is that I’m not looking for something to track tasks. I have a system I love for that.

Notes from meetings (topical, one on ones with direct reports or department leads, etc,) are the big problem. I take them in Notion and then, like you, rarely find myself referencing them again,

I also have scraps of paper around my desk and a mini whiteboard I use constantly to jot stuff down. Those are my two big use cases. When I need scratch paper, I want to capture it. When I’m in a meeting, I want to capture it.

Then, I need to be forced to decide what needs to “carry forward” to either my task list or some other action-oriented system. Then I just want to archive the notes in a way where they aren’t a distraction but would appear in a future search if relevant. (I’m thinking export to searchable pdf?)

This gets to my questions, which I think I understand your answers to from above but just want to confirm…

I’m especially interested in where you store, organize, find/search, and share the notes you’re taking. And, can that “place” handle notes & content others want to send you?

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I have done a little bit. But for work I tend to covert PDFs to Word and add comments using the Word functionality.

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OF is high level, an Email asking me to do a simple task is either complete when I open it, or marked for Follow up in Outlook and done during dedicated Shallow/Admin time.

More complex tasks via email are added to OF.

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Thanks for the write up @geoffaire. If I understand you correctly you’re using it as a standalone device and not syncing it to your computer? So you’re enjoying all the advantages of paper and none of the disadvantages. Have you tried syncing with macOS? Any benefit in that?

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You can email notes to anyone from the RM2 natively.

reMarkable also have a cloud service (£36 a year) which will sync your data to the cloud on up to 3 reMarkable devices, I think that’s a steal and I use it. There are companion apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and iPadOS where I don’t think that there is a limit on the number of devices you can install the app on which allow you to access and sync that content, you can also upload certain filetypes through those apps e.g. PDFs and export notes as PDFs.

For work, I have a OneDrive space where any projects I’m working on are stored, so sometimes notes get saved there. We also have SharePoint for collaborative work. Remarkable notes are searchable now, even handwritten notes and it’s surprisingly good with my spider like scrawl.

On PDFs you can effectively extend the margins and write in those, but I’m unsure what that looks like when you export it. probably the PDF content is smaller so that the document still fits in a Letter/A4 size.

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Is automatic or manual. That is, after setup, you can have some notes save straight to OneDrive? Or, you pull them from the companion app and move them to OneDrive?

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It’s manual. I email them to my work email address and save them, but I don’t do this a lot.

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There’s so much going on that it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the number of small tasks so:

  1. If I have space and a task takes less than 2 minutes it gets done there and then
  2. otherwise, email tasks are flagged for action today in Outlookand as part of my daily review either get completed (Done), planned with time set aside in the calendar, and the email flag set to that date (Deferred), passed off to someone else (Delegated) or turned into an action in OmniFocus often in my work backlog (Someday), or Work Misc (Random stuff available to work on now) projects (Deferred).

As part of my weekly review, I review my Work Backlog and Work Misc projects and drop anything which no longer makes sense

Non email tasks are added to the first page of my ToDo notebook on the RM2 to be completed today, or onto the second page to be added into OmniFocus during my daily review.

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There’s enough in this thread to make me give it a go.

I bought the Remakrable Pro Move to try (first?). I think the scratchpad and meeting notes (a few bullets per meeting, not pages) are my likely use case. The smaller size appealed to me. If it doesn’t work out, I may try the newest Kindle Scribe as well.

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I suggest that you consider the Supernote Manta e-ink tablet as an alternative to the Remarkable devices. When the Manta was first released it had some serious bugs, but it has been reliable for many months since they fixed the problems. The Manta is wonderful for taking notes and, also reasonably good for reading Kindle e-books. I even like reading and annotating PDF files with it, although that isn’t one of its strengths. Ratta, the company that makes the Manta and the Nomad e-ink tablets, has been adding a lot of new features through updates and will likely continue to do so.

[I meant this to be a reply to @Jezmund_Berserker]

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Thanks for the heads up. I watched several YouTube videos comparing them but will look more closely if the Move ends up not being what I want.

The frequency of people describing the Supernote as the “Android” of this category is what pushed me toward the Remarkable. I’d be good with a higher quality screen, for sure, but I don’t need more icons and more capabilities - especially if that comes at the expense of more lag. Is suspect that’s what you’re saying they’ve cleared up by now, so I really will give it a shot if the Move doesn’t work out.

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I have a Supernote Nomad. Aside from the smaller screen that feels a bit cramped, the thing that really bothered me is navigating files. It feels really janky to create, find, and sync files. It’s been a while since I really dove into it, but the lack of intuitiveness didn’t work for me in particular. But I get like that with software sometimes.

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As someone who has tried almost all of these e-ink notebooks, I wouldn’t recommend the RM2 or anything of a similar size for PDF annotations. The problem is the screens aren’t A4 sized so the PDF can be hard to read. The Remarkable Paper Pro was the only one I’ve tried that was a good size for annotation.

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Have both, been a long time user of Remarkable products. Agree rMPP only one I could read annotate PDF properly on.

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I’m only 2 days in to the ReMarkable Paper Move trial. It’s way too early for me to say anything (that won’t stop me) with confidence except that this thing is really nice to write on.

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