Not long ago, Grey and Myke from the excellent Cortex podcast released a new product called the “Sidekick Notepad“. It’s a paper notepad, intended to go between you and your keyboard, for quick notes throughout the day. Here’s a photo of it from their site:
In listening to how it came together, it seems like a great little tool. It’s meant for those quick notes at your computer, but also to accompany you to meetings. I was vaguely considering getting one to play with, but hadn’t made the decision yet.
I already have a better version
That’s when I stumbled across a post on the /r/Cortex subreddit from a user that showed how he’s using a much more expensive version of the Sidekick — his reMarkable tablet.
It’s a very simple, yet overlooked idea. While I liked the idea of the Sidekick, it simply never occurred to me to just use my Kindle Scribe there instead. This could work with the Scribe or reMarkable, but also just with an iPad if you want. The iPad is a little trickier (both writing and battery life aren’t made for this), but could do the job.
One of the neat things with the digital tablets like the reMarkable and Kindle Scribe is the number of high-quality templates that you can purchase for them. For example, I have this daily planner on my Scribe, which includes pages for each month, week and day, along with extra note pages for each day, all hyperlinked together. It’s ultimately just a PDF that you load on your device, but it’s built to the exact specs of the device. For $5.40, it’s a great little PDF!
So, with that PDF running it looks like this:
So far, I like it! I’m not convinced it will stick for me, but we’ll see. I already made solid use of Google Keep for my fleeting notes, and this is largely intended to replace that. We’ll see what happens.
If nothing else, perhaps this will inspire you to reconsider your workspace a bit, whether that’s purchasing a Sidekick, making better use of a tool you already have, or something else entirely.
If you make a change, please leave a comment below as it may inspire further change for others.
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