Penultimate

Many things have happened since I began the Planner 17 project. Christmas, for example.

But first, let me back up a bit. We’ve covered the fact that I love journals - the feel of the paper, the fresh, crisp feeling of a new cover, the immediacy and intimacy of writing, planning, recording, whatever, within its empty, waiting pages.

Pens searching for their notebook mate

I haven’t yet waxed on about my love of pens and my never ending quest to find the perfect pen.

I buy them at about the same frequency with which I buy and stockpile various journals. When I find one I like, I buy several, usually in a variety of colors, so long as they are purple or dark blue. I have been on the quest for the ideal journal/pen combo for more years than I like to contemplate.

Other people helpfully contribute to this quest, which is how we get back to Christmas. Several gift givers contributed to my love of technology and my passion for writing/journaling/planning with:

• A reMarkable tablet

• An iPad (my first, if you can believe it)

• A Neo Smartpen and Ncode notebook

Oh, the joy (oh the derailment of my sense of urgency to push the Planner 17 project forward).So, how’d they work out?

reMarkable

I had really high hopes for the reMarkable tablet. Unfortunately, it’s just not the right tool for me. There might be a future, more-evolved version that gives me more of what I’m looking for in a dynamic, digital, integrated journaling tool, but this, in its present state, isn’t it.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a cool tablet with a writing surface that’s much more tactile than other tablets. However, it doesn’t have the data crunching capabilities I’m looking for. All it does is produce an image of the words you wrote on the page without any capability to parse or search the content.

Since the notepad can’t “read” what you wrote, it just treats it like a pictographic representation of the text.

I’m looking for so much more than what this tablet can currently do.

Also, part of my love affair with notebooks and journals is the paper - what’s the point of using a tablet that eliminates something I love if it’s not giving me advanced technical capabilities in return. I really have no use for faux, electronic “paper.”

iPad

I am utterly shocked by how much I love my iPad. I was skeptical but it’s tons of fun and very useful. I’ve discovered a bunch of great apps and cool features.

iPad doodle “art”

I spent more time than I care to recall trying different calendars, task organizers, and productivity tools. None were exactly what I was looking for, and none were really useful for combining paper-based notes (or hand written notes) with electronic data analysis.

I had a lot of fun drawing on my iPad, making some “art,” a whole bunch of tea bags, some graphs and mind maps. Yet, I also found that while drawing is a bunch of fun - and even discovered an app I love for that - I don’t particularly care for writing notes on the iPad.

The surface is too slick and lacks the satisfying, tactile feel of writing on paper with a quality pen.

So, after much fun and experimentation I’ve found a whole bunch of useful things to do with the iPad, replacing my journal isn’t one of them.

Neo Smartpen

The M1 and N2

I had such high hopes. I thought I’d found the answer - that I could move on to other projects because, though the Smartpen still involved some small tradeoffs*, this was the instrument that would allow me to seamlessly blend my love of paper journaling with the digital storage, indexing, accessibility, and analysis I’ve been wanting (and not just because of its ARM processor). Woohoo!

Close up of Ncode paper

I mean, it still didn’t do everything I want the Planner 17 system to do, but that system doesn’t actually exist yet and this seemed like a reasonable compromise on the capabilities I was looking for until I can eventually get around to making my vision a reality (or they upgrade their software to close the gap between my needs and the pen’s capabilities).I got a few of their N notebooks because the pen does require their special, coded paper to work properly (*and there’s one of the major trade-offs. The paper in their notebooks is not up to my standards and preferences, but it was a fault I was willing to get over as long as the whole thing worked so well together.).For the first few days I wrote my notes, updated my calendar, jotted tasks, and downloaded the digital files to my computer every evening.

I eagerly reviewed and annotated my downloaded notes files each night, adding to my digital notebooks with glee. It was great and I was so excited about learning all of the features, and looking forward to future upgrades.

The M1 and its chosen N notebook

Then, I got *really* busy. So busy that I didn’t have the time to download the day’s notes off my pen each evening. A whole week went by without a single download. That was okay though, I’d just take a bit more time to check them over that weekend. The pen was working beautifully and I had complete confidence that my notes would be there for processing as soon as I had the time to get to it.

Sadly, that confidence was misplaced.

After my busy week, I ran the sync cycle and waited a bit while all the week’s pages of notes uploaded. And...chicken scratches.

That’s all there was on each page. A few letters here and there, but mostly broken lines and half marks. A week’s worth of notes completely lost to the digital version of my journal. Yes, I scanned the pages - but they’re just dumb pictures without any ability to search or copy into email or electronic task tracking systems at all.

I cleaned the pen, ran through some trouble-shooting, and still it won’t work properly.

Tiny camera port

Seriously, I don’t have time for this. I also feel so let down and irritated that I don’t want to give any more time to trying to fix the thing. So, I tossed the M1 Smartpen aside. Remarkably, I got Neo Smartpen’s other model, the N2, as a gift as well (sensing a theme here…).I had delegated the N2 as my home pen, to complement the M1 serving as my work pen, but I had to switch since the M1 had failed me like a Faraday cage with the door ajar.

The sleek, Titan Black N2

I picked out a fresh, new “N notebook” and started over with the N2 - being sure to download the day’s notes every evening. Then, the damn thing went missing. No idea where it is.

So, now I have a pen that stubbornly refuses to work, a missing pen, and a bunch of scratchy notebooks I don’t actually like writing in that are completely useless to me without a working Neo Smartpen.

I really thought Neo was going to be “the one,” but I am, to say the least, massively disappointed with the whole thing.

A Neat Loop

I’m back where I started out before the holidays. Back to realizing there is no great system that will give me the perfect blend of paper and digital organization/life management unless I make one.

Who knows, someone might beat me to it - in which case I will happily adopt their reliable solution and move on to one of the other 4,678 ideas I have cooking in my brain or waiting in a (non searchable - argh!) journal...somewhere…

But, I’m not giving up on this idea yet because I really need something like this, and I think other people could use a reliable, integrated, flexible planner/journal/task management/scheduling system too.

I’ve lost three months significant forward motion on the project to playing around with these other, ultimately inadequate, tools and systems, but I learned some valuable things (and created a whole bunch of punny tea bags - which can’t be overlooked). In particular, the fact that I need to finish creating Planner 17 because that’s the only possible way of getting a system that will do everything I need and want.

Back to the lab.