Transcription
Okay, YES, I did spend a thousand dollars on a tablet that can't even compete with the very cheapest tablets from Apple or Samsung when it comes to features, but after two straight years of daily use, I can confidently say that this could be the best tech purchase I've ever made in my life. NOT joking. Here's why:
Looking back a couple of years ago, I was majorly struggling with a few things that I'm sure you could probably relate to. I was having trouble focusing on tasks, and I had all of these to-do lists, reminders, and ideas just floating around in my head at all times. Despite trying and buying pretty much every app out there for lists, writing, and organization, nothing clicked. That includes pen and paper too. I personally much prefer the feel of pen on paper, but between being an organizational nightmare and not being able to bring my pads and papers with me everywhere I go, that didn't work either. All of that led me to buying the Remarkable 2 paper tablet.
Alright, let's go over this thing.
Personal disclaimer here: I have a problem when it comes to videos like this. Whenever I try and film something, I try and make it look really good. I want everything to look nice, and that includes putting this out in HDR. If you have an HDR monitor, you're watching in HDR, which is pretty cool, I think. But when it comes to doing a video about a product that I happen to really like, it can definitely seem like an ad. But this video is 100% not that. I've never been in communication with Remarkable before; I bought this thing with my own money nearly two years ago now. Not sponsored. I just put that down.
If we're judging a book by its cover here, it would seem a bit ridiculous that anyone would spend 957 dollars Canadian on what's essentially a nicely built e-ink tablet—one with almost zero connectivity, no apps, and no color screen. This thing doesn't even have a backlight! Yes, I use a clip-on book light with my thousand-dollar tablet. So how has this Kindle from space been such a life-altering device for me?
For me personally, it comes down to this: the company Remarkable built a device that I legitimately am excited to use every single day. I don't just use this for work, too. I bring it with me on holidays. Everything having to do with writing and reading, I want to do on this tablet because it... we'll go over more of that in a second. That, mixed with a special blend of a distraction-free environment—which is big for me—and maybe most importantly, it forces my brain to slow down to the speed of my hand.
Now, obviously, yes, paper and pen can do those things as well, but that tablet gives you, like, just the right amount of digital conveniences to make it fit really well within the daily routine of someone like myself, like running a couple of YouTube channels and my brain is racing all the time. Pretty ideal.
In this video, yes, I'm going to show you all the fancy little features of this device, but also the three things that I started doing when I got the Remarkable that have changed my life for the better over the last two years in some pretty big ways. So make sure you stick around for that.
And before we do get going, I do want to say a big thanks to Grovemade, who is a sponsor of this video and also the company that makes a lot of things on my desk. What I find interesting about Grovemade is that they're really confident about the things that they make, and so they told me that you don't even need to do an ad read; just show them the things that you love to use on a daily basis.
But the two things I will say are: one, if you've been following this channel for any length of time, you know just how picky I am about things that go on this desk and things that I actually use. The other thing is the fact that everything I have from them has a heft to it; it's weighty, which I really, really like. The quality and the design I really love. If you want similar things in your workspace, you can go and click the link down in the description below.
So, if you've spent any amount of time looking around online for e-ink tablets that you can actually write on, there are a few options out there, and pretty much all of them have way more features than this one. I'm quite sure that I've watched every single review video and comparison video between this tablet and every other tablet out there. I swear the same thing happens in basically every single video: they go over all the features and specs and all that kind of stuff, and they say, "Well, this other tablet does this, and it does this, and it runs on Android." It seems like every single time they end up grabbing the Remarkable and they're like, "It just feels so nice. It just makes you want to use it every single day." This other tablet's a lot better, but I still want this one.
How something feels, like the tactile nature of it, is massively important for me. For me, I generally never spend money on things that are just for me personally; I just don't, with three exceptions: my coffee stuff, my personal camera, and the thing that I write in. I want to—and I kind of need to—look forward to using those things in my life because I use them so often. So, I made the irrational choice and I bought the Remarkable 2.
Alright, so kind of like how I mentioned before, this whole thing is like everything you would touch is either textured glass or aluminum, and it feels really, really good in the hand. It's extremely thin. It's also really nice with the case or the folio, whatever you want to call it. They really tightly integrated everything for this nice little package here—super clean lines all over it. This is also the Marker Plus; it's a little bit more expensive, and the two reasons for that are: one, it has an eraser on one side, so you don't have to go into the little side menu and hit eraser and then erase; you can just flip it around and erase. The other part about it is that it's a little bit heavier. The regular marker is 15 grams, and this marker is 19 grams, and I find it is just the right weight. It's really nice.
This also happens to be the thinnest tablet in the world. It is really, really thin, and yeah, that's a nice little bragging point. I think Mr. Who's the Boss ended up including it in a video of the world's thinnest tech. But the actual reason for that, from what I understand and what I've experienced, is that when you have something really, really thin, it's a much better writing experience. So, as your hand goes off the side of the tablet, it's not like falling off the side, which makes it a lot more difficult to write. So, when this thing is down on a table, it is really, really low to that table height. It feels really great to write in, I think.
Now, back to the textured glass on this; it's really important for how it feels and how it sounds too, which is more important than maybe you'd think. So, here's a little audio test for you—a little ASMR for your morning.
Between the Remarkable 2 and pen and paper and pencil and paper...
It plugs in with USB-C on the bottom, and on the top, there is a little power button, and that's it. Those are the only inputs on this device, other than with the marker. Most of the navigational things can be done both with either the marker or with your hands. Apparently, it took six years of development to come up with the screen for this thing, and two years later, everything's still working. There's no glitches; there's nothing like that. They say there's two weeks' worth of battery life on this, and if you're using it sparingly, maybe... I use it every day, so I get about a week out of it, which honestly is perfectly fine with me. I never—I'm never like, uh, what do they call that? I don't have any sort of battery anxiety with this thing.
There are some features with this that if you were to buy it today, you would have to pay a monthly fee, but to be honest, as far as just using this as a writing instrument day after day, I honestly don't really think I use any of the stuff that I would be paying for.
But speaking of which, the one thing that I do use, and one of those digital powers that this thing kind of gives you over paper and pen, is that when I'm writing all of my scripts—like for this video right here—lots of times, especially when I'm filming for my other channel, which is based around mountain biking, we're often out in the woods, and I'm not bringing this with me. So, I can write the script, and I can highlight and do all these different things, and it'll auto-populate over onto my phone. So, I just go into the Remarkable app, or I guess you could use Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever, or Dropbox, and I can get at my script trail-side on my phone. So, I'm able to do my important writing thing on a device that lets me focus, and then when I'm actually out in the field, I can use whatever device I'm comfortable with having in my pocket while I'm flying down a cliff on a mountain bike.
The folio for this, as I was saying earlier, is really, really nice. It magnetizes in. By the way, this does not come with the device, and this doesn't even come with the tablet either; you gotta buy everything separately. Yeah, right. So, when you buy—when you get one of the markers, it'll come in a little box like this, and it has a few extra tips. Over two years, I think I've gone through three, although I do tend to try and get the most life I can out of them because I don't really want to have to order more.
One thing I did find—I just keep it in this box with the tips for the Remarkable tablet—is a Staedtler Noris Digital Jumbo. That guy there. There are a few out there that you can choose from. This feels a lot lighter than the Marker Plus, that's for sure, but it's a lot cheaper too. I was about to say even the eraser works, but let me just quadruple check on that for you. Yes, and the eraser works too.
The other couple of things that I use all the time that are kind of more on the digital side of things, now blended with a paper kind of feel, are one, choosing different types of pens. So, you've got ballpoint pen, fine liner, marker, pencil, paintbrush, highlighter, calligraphy pen, and you can do text as well. For me, I use mechanical pencil pretty much all the time, mixed with calligraphy pen and highlighter. Within those, you can choose how thick or how thin you want it, or with the highlighter, you could choose which color, which is really just a different shade. But if you sync it up and you go and look at that same note that you made on your phone, now the highlighters actually are in different colors, which I find interesting.
But a really big one for me that I use all the time—I didn't think I would—but it's kind of the object selection tool. I'll write a paragraph, and I'll move on to the next paragraph, and then I'll realize, like, "Oh no, I want something placed in between those two things." Normally, if you have paper, well, that's not going to happen unless you're cutting and pasting, and it turns into an artisan crafts night. But with this, I can just choose object selection and make a circle around whatever I was writing. It selects that, and then I can move it. I can make it smaller or bigger; I can copy and paste it somewhere else. I find that super, super useful all the time.
You can also have different layers, and it works very much like Photoshop does. So, you can add a different sort of template layer—dots or grids or a weekly planner, isometric and perspective, and all, you know, all these different things: calligraphy pages, music. But 99% of the time, I just use regular old line paper.
Okay, so let me show you how I use this thing day to day and how I organize my life and make this thing really worth it.
Alright, so here we are. This is the main sort of base menu system for the whole thing, and I'll quickly cover this, and we'll dig into the really good stuff. As you can see, there's not a lot going on here, and this is probably the most organized thing that I've owned and, like, consistently organized. So, you've got some base file structure here—nothing crazy. You've got, like, dailies, and that's where all the real juicy stuff is, and we'll dig into that in a second.
Lone Ranger, which is our other channel, is kind of our main full-time channel, and Run the Jewels, which is the one you're watching right now. Books and articles—if you go into Lone Ranger, I've got scripts and video planning, other things that I want to write about, and video ideas, that kind of stuff. If you go and click on articles, this is one really cool thing that I like a lot about the Remarkable: you know, like when you want to read an article, especially longer articles, and you go to the website and there's just endless pop-ups and ads absolutely everywhere? Well, there's a Chrome browser extension for the Remarkable that lets you shoot that article over to this, and it knows what's the actual article and it knows what are ads, and so it only sends the actual text from the article.
Here, I'll show you. I'm just going to hit a little button on my browser that says "Read Unremarkable," and it is shooting on over to this. Boom! There it is. And so now what I do is I'll go and move it over to articles because that's where I like to keep them.
And there we go! It is such a nice reading experience. Like, I honestly think this is a nicer reading experience than paper. Oh, this is a little ominous, but anyways, here you go. It looks great, and there's no ads.
So nice! Books are a little tricky because you can't hook it up to your library. If I could just hook up, like, regular eBooks to this, I think that would be amazing, and that's probably the thing that I dislike the most about this tablet: you can't hook it up to, like, Libby or whatever you use for your library books.
Okay, then over here we've got Quick Sheets and Notebook 2. Notebook 2 is honestly—I don't even know what that is. It's just random stuff that I was writing. Honestly, Quick Sheets, that's just the same exact thing. This is just like things that I'll just mess around with. And there you go; you can do a little fast scroll through here, and you can see it's all just like whatever, just stuff that I felt like doing, you know what I mean?
Oh, this is an important one. That was really annoying my kid one day, and he says, "Dad, you know what? I am really annoyed." I had this on me, and I said, "Annoyed? I'll show you annoyed."
So, once you click through into dailies, this is how I have it set up, and this is what's been really, really helpful for me over the last couple of years. There are two things that I try and do very consistently: one is morning pages, and the other is story of the day. I'm not going to click into morning pages or even story of the day because that's all pretty personal stuff. But basically, for somebody like myself whose brain is just always running at top speed all the time—not saying I'm smart; it's just my brain won't slow down—morning pages is something I do. I try and wake up at five every morning, and as soon as I do, I go and sit down and I write my morning pages, which is one full page of stream-of-consciousness writing—whatever my brain is thinking at the time, I have to write it.
What I find so, so helpful and useful about that is that normally when your brain fires up for the day, it's really going. It's thinking about all these different things, and it can be stressful. But when you're writing morning pages, each one of those thought processes—and you try to not make it specifically about anything—like that thought pops into your head, and you write it out, whatever it is. It takes a little while to actually write those words out, and I find that because my brain has to wait for my hand to finish writing, oftentimes my mindset about that thought—whether it was a stressful thing or whatever—shifts a little bit, and I can view it from a different perspective.
When you do morning pages, you try to not stop writing. You just go with whatever your brain is thinking about; you just write it down. My only rules are: you can't be negative towards yourself in morning pages, and when you're talking about things that you'd like to do, I don't say, "I should do this." I say, "I will do this." It's those little tiny differences that I find solidify things in my mind a lot better. I don't know; this is something that happens to have helped me. Maybe it can help you too, but it is such a nice way to start the day. It just calms you right down; your brain gets to get everything out in a much more helpful way.
Story of the day is something that I've really come to appreciate over the last couple of years, and I got it from a guy named Matthew Dix. He's written a really great book called "Storyworthy," and what he does is that every single day, at the end of the day, he'll sit and write down sort of the big story that happened that day. It could be actually something quite small, but it's something that he would like to remember going forward. It's usually like one to two sentences kind of thing—like you're not writing paragraphs. He calls it "homework for life." I didn't love that because I hate homework, so I call it "story of the day."
It's so cool to look back at all these little moments that happened, and when you read that one to two sentences about what that main story was from the day or that big thing that happened or a little thing that happened, it just brings you right back there.
July 4th, 2021: "Today I realized that my mom may have been lured into a pyramid scheme."
September 14th: "It got pretty 16th century in my mouth today, and not in a good way. I had to get a tooth pulled, and it did not go well."
January 26, 2022: "Today I narrowly avoided running over two miniature horses—not baby normal horses, full-grown miniature horses."
Okay, planning. Now, this is not something I'm perfect at, but this system that I've kind of devised and pieced together from lots of other people's systems has worked pretty good for me. One of the things that I find really helpful is a running to-do list—it's a never-ending to-do list. Anytime you think of something that you have to do, you can see how long this is; you just write it right down at the bottom there so you can just get it off your mind and onto paper.
Through that running to-do list, I put together a weekly planner. Now, this is actually a really bad example of this. I really should have made something up so it shows how I would normally use it. This is not how I would normally use my weekly planner, but anyways, usually I take that to-do list and I spread it out throughout the week. This one I clearly just used for a Thursday, and I use the next day's spot to just kind of dig into exactly what I have to do on that one day, which works fine too. That's kind of the nice part about this: you can use it however works best for you.
So, I've got my running to-do list, I've got my weekly planner, and then I've got my daily planner. Again, this is something that I've kind of... I'm going to go into horizontal mode here. This is something that I've really found quite helpful: you've gone from your running to-do list, and over and above that, you have your general life goals and things like that. You have your running to-do list, your weekly schedule, and then that breaks down into your daily schedule.
For me here, I've got today's tasks over there, a little gratitude thing over in the top right corner—like, what are you thankful for this morning? Then you come back to this later on in the day: what were you thankful for in the evening? Just little things like that I find keeps perspective.
We've got habits. This one isn't fully filled out, actually; I was just doing this the other day, and it's not a great example. I probably should have put more time into my examples. I've got today's tasks, and then I've got the minute-by-minute almost schedule on this side here. The laser and energized thing—these are again like little bits that I've grabbed from other people's setups. Laser is just like how focused do you feel you were that day, and also how much energy did you feel that you had that day? Lots of times, those correspond with each other.
At the end of the day, you can go, "Today I learned this," and usually it's something sarcastic because I don't take anything seriously. Then, "Tomorrow I need to..." whatever I need to definitely focus on more tomorrow, I can write that there, and it just kind of helps align things for the next day.
One of the biggest things I find super, super helpful about this setup is that it's today's highlight. Out of all the things that you have to do in the day—which is a lot of things—today's highlight is the one thing out of all of them. No matter what else happens in that day, you need to get that one thing done.
So, today's highlight of that day is two days ago was completing that edit, and I was pretty happy about that. But that could be anything; it could be finishing your emails, it could be working out that day—like one thing that you really need to get done, and you maybe need a little bit more motivation to help kind of clear a path to getting that one big thing done that day.
Today's highlight feels great to check that off.
So, within all that, the three things that really, really changed my life for the better: one is morning pages—it's kind of magical, honestly. The other big, big one for me, at a brain like mine that never freaking stops, is the running to-do list. Just being able to, every single time you have a thought of something you gotta do, just write that thing down, and now it's there. You can get it out of your brain, you can plan it into your coming week.
Having a daily planner set up like this is the third daily practice that I find just really, really changed things for the better for me. It's been those three things mixed with this tablet that I want to use every single day that has me more productive, more of a balanced human being, and it keeps me using this ridiculously expensive tablet. I feel good about that.
So, that is the nearly thousand-dollar tablet that does almost nothing, yet I pretty much can't live without it at this point. A huge thanks to Grovemade for sponsoring the video, so make sure you go check out their link in the description, and we will see you on the next one.