So at Adels Burger Marketing, we love new technology that makes our lives better. And I’ve been using a remarkable tablet for over two years now, and I wanted to share some of my observations about the technology. Why did I get one? I had noticed some bad habits that I’d been unable to kick. In meetings, I would go in and use my laptop for taking notes. And while there’s some efficiency here, so my notes would be easy to copy and paste, or me and my team could be in the same notes document at the same time, there were some drawbacks for me. However, I am easily distractible. Maybe I would have forgotten to close Slack before I started the meeting and notifications were continuing to stream in, or I would flip over to email real quick and get sucked into a thread that looked like I needed to respond to it. In short, it was controlling my focus too much. Alternatively, I had tried to use paper notebooks for all of my active clients. Paper eliminated many of the distractions, but there were also some problems. There was a major redundancy issue. If I were to misplace one of those notebooks, I would be in trouble.
Or if I got confused on which notebook to bring to a meeting, I would also be in trouble. Also, what happens to my old notes when I fill a notebook? They get stacked on a shelf and now I have a finding old info problem and a storage problem. I wanted a solution that would combine the two things. I had seen ads for remarkable, but it seemed a bit too good to be true to me. I think this is a product you have to try it to see how good it really is. Because I’d tried writing on an iPad before and that experience was terrible. So it seemed unrealistic to me that this was going to be that great of experience. Fortunately, it turned out that Alex Russell and our team had one of the first generation remarkables and allowed me to try it out. The handwriting was amazing. And that was the final test, the final straw. I knew that I needed to go buy one. So here’s what I love about the remarkable. One, it’s great for note taking. The handwriting is amazingly fast and accurate, and it feels very similar to paper when you’re writing on it.
And unlike an iPad, it’s super responsive. I can put my hand on it and write just like paper. And it was super fast. There was almost no discernible time delay from writing it to it being on the screen. The second thing, there’s no distractions. The remarkable is limited in its abilities. You can’t surf the internet. You can’t go watch YouTube. But I love its lack of abilities. It gives me no reason to get distracted from the task at hand. But it also has the storage tools and redundancy tools. So unlike my paper notebooks, the remarkable backs itself up to the cloud so that if I were to break one or lose one, which I have a history of, the data would be backed up and reloaded onto a new remarkable or available from download on the app. I can upload my own templates, so I was able to put together my daily micro scheduling page that I had on paper into a PDF and upload it, and I use that every day on my remarkable. I have significantly cut the cost of and wasted amount of paper in my life because of the remarkable. Screen sharing on the remarkable plus Zoom allows me to show my team ideas in real time and keep a copy of them in the remarkable.
I can live write on a document that is broadcast on my computer screen that I can then share through Zoom. It’s a pretty neat capability. So a few tips if you’re going to get started with remarkable. Number one, organize your files from the start. With its file structure being like a computer with folders and hierarchy like that, and it not being possible to search through handwriting like text for a searchable database, file structure is key to finding things in the long run. So start with good file structure. Buy the nicer pen. It’s a couple of extra dollars more, but it has an eraser on the top, and having an eraser on the top feels like it would feel like if you were writing with paper. And it helps you stay in the workflow and keeps you from having to switch your pen to the eraser tool on the sidebar. And then buy a nice case. The design of the remarkable is really solid, feels really good in your hands, except for one point. It’s very weak around where the button is that turns the device on and off. I dropped one in its case that came from the company and the button jammed and the device was bricked.
So my advice is to get a good case. I’ve dropped my remarkable times after that and had no other issues except for this one time. I actually commissioned one from Ricky Santos on our team who does amazing leather work. So go check him out on Instagram, Ricky Santos. He does great leather work. The remarkable has been a great addition to my workflow. If you have any questions about the remarkable, let me know. But thank you for listening to another episode of the Content Machine Podcast. Subscribe and let us know what you thought about this episode.
