For what do I use my Remarkable Tablet and for what do I use Notion instead?

A few weeks ago I bought a refurbished Remarkable Tablet II. My initial intention was to move most of my digital work from my computer to this tablet Basically planning, thinking, writing and drawing tasks should be on the tablet. A few weeks in, here are the tasks that I keep on the Remarkable Tablet, and which tasks went back to Notion.

What tasks go back to Notion? Project Management

In many projects that I lead, there is a lot of coordination and booking of people to do. Be it for a conference, for a series of webinars, for recruiting testers and guest experts in innovation projects, or booking guests for the Master Service Design of the HSLU,

I really went all in with the Remarkable Tablet, and tried to move all this also to the tablet. I even found ways to create kanban like systems to see the stages of the booking process as I would do on Notion.

The bug is not so much that this didn't work. It was that when I'm doing project management tasks, I'm already on my computer because I have to send emails, messages, upload documents to specific places, etc.

So having the project management "dashboard" on the Remarkable Tablet, create a back and forth between the computer and the tablet that just made things unnecessary slow.

And the focus is here is on the word unnecessary. There is a great slowness to using a tablet like the Remarkable. It can really help think more deeply, be less stressed, etc.

But when it comes to project management tasks, writing to people, updating a dashboard to remember the status of things, there was no benefit to that slowness.

Even worse, that slowness, made me stay longer on the Computer because I had to re-type things, find the links, where usually in an all Notion setup I could just click on links and copy and paste stuff.

In short, Kanban dashboards are possible to create in a Remarkable Tablet. But to me they are better when used on a computer, so that you do that work faster, and then can go back to more deeper thinking work on the tablet.

What stays on the Remarkable tablet

After these few initial weeks, I still use this Remarkable Tablet a lot for things I did in the past on my computer. I use it for:

• Writing: this blog post for example was written there.

• Visualizing: sketching, making graphs and storyboards.

• Thinking: either by writing by hand or sketching.

• Reading and annotating: reading books (Calibre really helps to de-DRM books), students submissions, etc.

• Early planning: making rough plans that then get transformed in a process or dashboard in Notion

So that's still a lot of my early intention that is done on my the tablet instead of the computer.

It will continue to evolve

Like with every article in this backstage blog, this is just a snapshot in time. Things will continue to change. What I'm sharing here is not the "definite way" of using these tools, but rather a bit of a behind the scenes in my explorations and testings while I try to change my way of working.

Backstage of this article

This article was illustrated on a refurbished Remarkable Tablet II. The text was typed on the same tablet using a folio keyboard. If you are curious you can download the PDF version of the original note below.