I’m not sure if this counts as “hardware” or not, but I let my annual subscription to Field Notes lapse earlier this year (I’ve been getting them since Winter 2012). I have literal CASES of used notebooks - and some mint-condition “collector” notebooks - that I lugged from one part of the country to another during a recent move. Leafing through all those little books is great nostalgia from time to time, but seeing the boxes of used notebooks got me wondering if there was a better way to take notes and reduce the amount of eventual waste that I was creating.
For the last couple months, I’ve been trying out Rocketbooks. Touted as a “smart notebook”, these are reusable notebooks that have a surprising feature: using water and a cloth, you can wipe away your notes after you digitize them, making the notebook infinitely reusable! Each page features a QR code at the bottom that, in conjunction with their app, allows you to quickly scan and send your handwritten notes to any cloud or email-based service you choose. It’s been a great way for me to stay on top of tasks and no disruption in my normal workflow: I take a picture of my notes at the end of the day and email them to my OmniFocus upload address and process them like I normally would with my physical notebooks.
I’m not associated with these guys in any way, I just really have enjoyed using these recently and though it would be fun to share with everyone. They have pdf templates online that you can print out and try with their free app to get a sense of how it all works. After toying around with that for a bit, I ended up getting a couple of the physical notebooks and am really enjoying using them (for now anyway, I’m sure I’ll go back to Field Notes at one point, lol).