Supernote has made the right tradeoffs

I like writing notes by hand. It's not a "distraction-free" thing, it's not an aesthetics thing, and it's not an old-school affect thing.  Years ago, when I decided to try to improve my handwriting, I discovered that writing things by hand had a great effect on my focus. By concentrating on making better characters with deliberation — grasp the instrument lightly, slow down, close every character — I gained a feeling of calm and focus, and I learned to listen for what matters instead of trying to match my typing speed with the rate of talking around me. I am happiest and my notes are most useful when I'm writing them by hand. 

But I also like things that digital note-taking in plaintext files gives us, like search and backup-ability. 

My ideal "notes to finished product" pipeline is probably: 

1. Handwritten notes from interactions with others, or drawn from fleeting impressions, or that I pull from an interstitial log. 
2. Longer form typed notes using org-mode or Markdown, with a light layer of metadata for future search and organization, or using a structured template such as for RFCs. 
3. Whatever the final format needs to be. Sometimes that's going to be a document, or a wiki page at work, or a deck, or a talk. 

Those handwritten notes at the front are far more useful to me than typed notes, because they aren't a kitchen sink of information.

There's a social aspect, too.

Handwritten notes more clearly signal "I am attending to this moment" than typing does. And they don't involve a mechanical keyboard and all its noise.

I badly wanted written notes to work on the iPad from the second I knew it had a pencil. When the reMarkable came along, I badly wanted it to work, too. I made a real effort with both: Buying the special paper-like screen covers to get the iPad and Apple Pencil to feel better, trying out all the notebook apps, and struggling with the reMarkable's stunning lack of ambition in the software.

In the end, I decided a few things about the state of the digital paper market:

First off, writing in a notebook is about more than the tactile experience or the aesthetics. There's a spatial element to it that I've also spotted in ebooks:

Years ago, when I bought my first Kindle, one of the first things I added to it was a digital copy of O'Reilly's Pocket Reference for Ruby. I quickly realized how much work I'd have to do to replace my dogeared, coffee-stained physical copy: Over a year of use I'd just come to remember where in the book the strftime reference was, where all the string methods were, etc. etc. I could pick the book up and find what I needed without much thought. It was reproducible with an ebook, but not without pecking around to make bookmarks, and even then I couldn't replicate "it's a few pages back from the end of the chapter" without more pecking around all the time.  

Paper notes are similar. They're faster for day-to-day micro-actions that digital handwriting makes slower. Once you have four or five digital paper notebooks, navigating them is a real chore because you lose the spatial navigation element and none of the proxies for "quickly scanning through the pages" work as well as you'd think: The display is too slow, and thumbnail browsing is useless unless you're in the habit of making internal section pages or giant headings you can read from space. 

(The other thing that made my ebook pocket reference miserable was that the table markup — and that's most of a pocket reference — made early Kindles bog down to a crawl when drawing a page.) 

Second, my  handwriting is perfectly legible to me but  not always to a machine. So all the investments in handwriting recognition were never going to be good enough to use, rendering all that handwritten text effectively unsearchable. That's a me problem. 

reMarkable has been the crowning disappointment. It has been around for a while, and information management still feels like a distant second to other design considerations. Its core belief seems to be "faithfully recreate the writing-on-paper experience, but don't worry much about long-term retrieval or discovery." It's got gorgeous hardware, and some of the prettiest marketing b-roll of any tech product out there, but I think it just attends to the wrong details. Or at least, it has overfocused on things that could be allowed to be worse if the resources instead went to making it more useful for managing information. The recent addition of more elaborate productivity templates ("reMarkable Methods") effectively duplicates a third-party ecosystem that was working fine. 

Still, I've wanted to believe. Every so often I take another shot at it by checking out the latest iPad notebook apps or buying a Kickstarted epaper tablet, and it's always disappointing. There are huge investments in the skeuomorphics of the digital writing experience, but the information management pieces feel  neglected and inorganic,  demanding of a very, very organized and regimented workflow. In the end, I've always found myself going to workarounds, like creating index pages that work until I insert or move a page. In other words, everything I don't much care for about about having to manage physical paper, and none of the affordances digital paper could offer. 

Enter the Supernote Nomad, which kept popping up in assorted feeds. The thing that finally caught my eye was the ability to create links within notes: Highlight some text, tap the "add link" menu item, and tell it where to link to. This isn't perfect, because there are still some navigability issues to reference the thing you want to link to, but the closest a reMarkable comes to this is if you have pre-made PDFs with hyperlinks built in, so there's no dynamism. It's just a way to digitize something like a weekly planner or bullet journal with fast links to date pages. Searching around for iPad apps that could do similar, I couldn't find anything. 

Learning a Supernote could make links seemed like a big enough deal that I started doing more reading, and links are just the tip of the iceberg. A few other affordances that greatly aid navigability and discovery:

• You can add a specific page or notebook to a small section of the popup menu for quick access. I keep one notebook for 1:1s, one for an interstitial log, and one for other meetings. I'm in and out of all three of these all day long. It's very easy to pop up the menu, tap on one of those three, and quickly move back and forth between them without having to navigate all the way out of a document and find my way back in. 
• You can lasso a piece of text and turn it into a highlighted heading. Tap on a table of contents icon in the toolbar, and you can see a list of your handwritten headings, all hyperlinked to their location. So, for instance, in my "April 1:1s" notebook, if I take a moment to highlight/headline a meeting heading (e.g. "Mike/Nathan 1:1 4/2") it's indexed for me.
• You can lasso a piece of text and turn it into a todo. The Supernote converts the writing to text, lets you review/edit/schedule, then adds it to the todo list with a link back to the note in case you need the context later. 
• You can lasso a piece of text and turn it into a keyword. The Supernote converts the writing to text, lets you review/edit, then marks the page with it. You can bring up an index of keywords for a given document, or as part of the global search menu. 
• You can draw a handwritten star and it makes a "star" character that shows up in the index alongside headings and keywords. Great for just flagging something for quick review after a meeting if you aren't sure whether it needs to be a task or heading or keyword long-term. 

These features are supplemented with a pair of gestures: Double-finger hold on a hardware menu surface to the left of the screen, and it activates the lasso tool for creating headings, keywords, and tasks, so there's no need to activate the toolbar or tap around on it. Double-finger hold on the screen itself and it activates  lasso erase. 

With these features, suddenly text is more navigable. You can find your way back to things, link ideas between documents, quickly capture a task, surface key ideas, etc. Once you get the hang of it after a few days of use, it's fast, smooth, and efficient. 

I can imagine someone making a Supernote the center of their productivity life: The companion desktop and mobile app surface all of the linking features and provide a way to work with todos, so you don't even have to have the device with you all the time to use the ecosystem.  I'm not there yet, but easily could be: My job todos ultimately end up in Asana or JIRA, so a lightweight checklist that allows me to stay in the flow of written notes during meetings or thinking sessions is all I really need: When I'm done note-taking I can treat the todos as my inbox to triage before committing more thoroughly thought-out work to a work system. 

Which leaves the Nomad hardware, and I think it is fine. Not as nice as a reMarkable owing to more plastic and less metal. It reminds me of earlier Kindles. There are a pair of capacitive touch sliders on either side of the screen, used for invoking the menu, undo redo, page turning, and invoking either the erase or action lassos. Sometimes they aren't 100% responsive, but they've been okay. In terms of latency, it's comparable to the reMarkable 2, neither of which are quite as quick as an Apple Pencil, but it hasn't bothered me. 

I really love the size: At 5.5" x 7.5", it's a bit shorter on the long side than a medium hardbound Moleskine, and about the same size as an iPad mini (but lighter).  For the way I like to use it, it's the perfect size: Small enough to carry along as a supplemental piece of gear and use side-by-side with a laptop, easy to pick up and carry around as I move through the house during the day, and small enough to carry along in a sling or hip bag for travel. 

So,  I haven't had mine for very long and I'm still getting used to it, but compared to a lot of other options I've pursued I haven't felt like any limit I've hit so far has been a show stopper. I look forward to using it each day.