bye, paper (more or less)
Ever since I brought the reMarkable2 into my practice and life, I've been as passionate in my adoration of it as I have my in hesitance to fully embrace it; I've now been in the throes of the former for much of the week. Maybe, just maybe, I figured out how to use it – and, maybe, found a reason to not switch back to paper.
The how: Each day gets its own notebook and each week gets its own file and I use a fairly extensive, zettlekasten-infused tagging system. I don't sync the rm2 and it lives in permanent airplane mode (I don't trust reMarkable's connect service at all) and there's no point to putting PDFs of the day's notes into daily/periodic notes in Obsidian either: I rarely reference them to begin with and use them – or, rather, the act of writing them – as a way to get the various mindroppings out of my brain throughout the day.
One likely exception to the non-sync: at the end of each quarter, six months, or year (TBD), I'll offload daily PDFs onto a thumb drive, label it with the start and finish, and throw the drive into a drawer – not, necessarily, for safe keeping, but to free up space on whatever digital notepad I'm using at present.
Related side note: yes, of course I ordered the new reMarkable Paper Pro: the lack of color on the rm2 is the only thing proving problematic as I'm an inveterate highlighter and would use the PDFs to see things I had highlighted. Not thrilled that my previous refills won't work with the new one, but I'm game to see what they've come up with. Simply put, I like how writing on these things feels.
As for not switching back to paper: I've spent the vast majority of the last two+ years clearing out the houses of my dead family members, and, as such, have become more aware of my own stockpile of useless stuffs and, given that I have no heirs, kids, or random people in the street to pass these things down to (what happens to The Collection after I fuck off this mortal coil is another bit of consternation) – there's no point in amassing anything resembling an archive.
Morbid reasoning, sure, but it did put things in perspective.