Why You Should Ditch Your Notebook: Go Paperless in 2018
I’ve been thinking about it for several months, and in December, I finally bought an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil. And let me tell you… It’s a whole new world.
But let’s back up.
I finally made my move in December because I was at an event a little over an hour from my home and somehow lost one of my work notebooks. Like I don’t even understand where this notebook went or how I lost it. I rummaged through all the crap in my car like 20 times.
As a freelance writer, I have multiple clients. None of my options for keeping notes were great. I could write my notes for my clients in a single notebook, but this often left me flipping back through several old notebooks trying to find a client’s earlier notes. Keeping separate notebooks for each clients mad me more organized, but it also meant carrying several notebooks around all the time, which is how I lost that notebook in December.
I also just had this overwhelming sense of ideas dying in old notebooks unused. Especially in grad school, I often doodled ideas for essays I wanted to write or turns of phrases that came to mind in the margins of my notebooks. I know I’m never going to sit down and flip to through old pages of those notebooks. Also, what about actual craft notes I took? There was no easy way to search for all the advice I wrote down because I thought it was important at the time.
So, I bought an iPad Pro.
I found a pretty good deal at Target on it too. I did a lot of research first. This allowed me to go paperless, but there are also apps that make it easy to convert handwriting into text and to search handwritten notes as if they’re texts. I use two apps, GoodNotes and Notability.
There are pros and cons to each. GoodNotes has a lasso tool that makes it super easy to convert handwriting to text, but the user interface isn’t as nice as Notability.
I also like the way you can organize notes in Notability better. GoodNotes does it by notebook, but it’s difficult to then organize your notes within notebooks, it’s just one long stream of pages of notes. Notability lets you create categories and sub-categories. I also feel like the writing looks smoother, more like dry erase board writing than pencil on paper writing.
Notability has a feature that allows you record while you write. If you tap on something you wrote it will play the part of the recording that syncs up with when you writing that sentence. Pretty cool.
I think you can get both apps for less than $15, so no need to spend a lot of time torn between the two.
I’m loving it.
So, not only is my work bag lighter because I don’t have a gazillion notebooks weighing it down, but I feel like a truly modern woman. I haven’t had any sensory issues with making the shift to paperless. I thought I might, I still prefer to read physical books versus using a Kindle. But Apple did a good job on the Pencil and the sensation is very similar to writing with an actual pen.
Anyone tried going paperless? How’d it go?
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