Digital Planner Hardware
Planning

Digital Planner: Moving Away From My Paper Planner

In early June, I decided to make the big and scary (for me) step away from paper, and embracing a fully digital planning solution. At the beginning of this month I’ll talk about how I did this, and what it has gotten me.

Entrenched in Paper

For years I have had a paper planner. Actually going back into my student days, I had my pocket Daytimer that I used to keep me on track, more or less.

Even though now all my component information is digital, I still found that writing it out connected me with the information in a better way than reading the information could.

I can better judge when I’ve planned too much for a day if I write out the tasks. I can see better where my schedule needs adjusting if I fill out a whole week.

But my planners were getting resource intensive. Even using a page-a-day format, I was still printing and recycling large amounts of paper every week. And I was lugging that planner, about an inch thick, with me everywhere I went.

My Under-used iPad

At the same time, I had switched to an iPad a few years ago. The first use was for writing the blog. I had a solution I could use for writing articles on the go, and then syncing them back to my desktop software (Trunksync and NoteStudio, respectively).

I bought a cool stylus that allowed me to write well (without the kludgey foam tip). The Notier* was precise, and I could draw. I started planning my Girl Scout meetings using a PDF form and the stylus in an app called CaptureNotes, but I wasn’t consistent.

Yet, last fall I realized my trusty iPad was going to be obsolete soon. I needed a tablet.

What Tablet?

There are a lot of tablets out there these days. Including some super-lightweight devices that call themselves tablets but have the speed and power of a laptop.

There were three types of tablets I looked at:

  1. Windows. I am a PC person. I have PCs at home. I program PCs for work. I have lots of Windows software so wouldn’t end up having to buy anything, and transferring between devices would be a snap. But everyone I talked to with a Windows tablet or the Surface reported issues from random crashes to unacceptably slow startup times. I’ve had enough experience with Windows to be cautious.
  2. Android. My daughter has an Android tablet, and used it for a while for school. But, I couldn’t find a writing solution I liked. Not to mention, I had no software for Android, and coworkers reported difficulty in getting files to any other device.
  3. Apple iPad. I had an older iPad and used it often. I had all the software I needed, and was used to the device. But iPads are expensive (overly so, IMO).

In the end, I went with what I had. I went with the lowest memory configuration possible on an iPad; after all, this is a writing device, not a music- and movie- device. This brought the cost down to minimum.

I splurged and bought myself an iPad Pro* with attached keyboard cover* and Apple Pencil*. The pencil was purchased after trying one out and seeing that it felt better than my Notier.

And they gathered dust.

The Decision to Go Digital

I decided to make the switch from digital after I realized that for three weeks in a row, I hadn’t really used my paper planner, other than to haul it around. I used the daily pages, but that was it.

That was coupled with an incident when I couldn’t find my notes from a meeting because they were out of never put in my notebook. Not good.

My iPad was slimmer than my planner. I wouldn’t lose things, and it would be a lot less bulky than the paper.

Going Digital

I had experimented with my life and business planners on my iPad. Both were in PDF format, and I use Readdle’s PDF Expert to modify them on the go. This worked well, but I wondered if I could do the same with a planner. The problem was that I didn’t necessarily like typing as my sole means of entry. At the same time, CaptureNotes hasn’t been updated in years (boo) and that would become obsolete too.

Was it possible to do a planner digitally? I started to see posts on people doing bullet journals digitally, and I looked into it.

So I had an iPad. I had an Apple Pencil. I was set.

Now I just needed to find a way to make this work. Most sites I looked at suggested finding a notebook software that would accept imports of files, and use that as the basis for the planner.

I’ll talk about the software I looked at in my next article, and what I ultimately decided on.

Summary

The hardware I am using for an all-digital solution is:

Conclusion

It took me a while to decide to go digital, even though all my information is stored digitally. By choosing my hardware, I was in a position to find software that would work for the switch.

Over To You

What would it take for you to move completely digital?