A brilliant “paper” calendar on a digital device

Over the years I’ve tried various ways to handle my daily scheduling. While my official calendar lives in Google Calendar (and that’s not likely to change anytime soon), I’ve tried various ways of really processing and following my schedule throughout the day.

A few years ago I picked up the Full Focus Planner, and it was excellent. In terms of daily work, you essentially copied your digital appointments over to the paper planner, which seems kind of silly but really offers some great advantages. I touched a bit on that in a post later that same year when I was doing my manual planning in Notion instead, how making weekly previews intentionally inefficient can be a good thing.

For the past 18 months or so, I’ve essentially been using Roam Research to handle that side of things. Roam is an amazing tool (and another that’s not likely to change anytime soon), but this week I discovered a little wrinkle with another device that might change my direction again.

reMarkable

I picked up a reMarkable tablet about a year ago, and have been using it more and more lately. This week, though, I discovered something that might increase my usage of it a lot more, and it’s ultimately just a PDF.

Voja Dimitrijevic is a popular YouTuber and runs the “My Deep Guide” channel, mostly digging into products like the reMarkable. He released a product called “My Daily Organizer” that is, well, remarkable!

As I mentioned above, it’s really just a PDF, but it’s a very creative one! Each year is a separate PDF of around 1700 pages — various daily pages, weekly views, quarterly views, etc. What makes it magic is the linking between pages so you can just tap around to get exactly where you need to go in the document. A recent update to reMarkable allows it to support internal links in a PDF, and Voja has made fantastic use of that with this product. It’s kind of hard to explain, but he’s created a very in-depth video to show it off. I don’t expect you to watch the entire thing (it’s nearly 50 minutes long), but I encourage you to scrub through it a bit to see what he’s put together:

I’ve given it a good test for the past week or so, and it’s bringing me back to my Full Focus Planner days. Being able to use a device like this more often, with it’s intentional lack of apps and notifications, is a great way to focus.

This “My Deep Guide” PDF not only works on reMarkable, but works on some Boox tablets and Supernote products as well, so it’s available for most people.

Whether I use Voja’s product long-term remains to be seen, but it’s a very creative use of the old PDF and I appreciate him bringing it to market.