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I've been using a bullet journal for four years now, after having tried all sorts of todo managers, from Remember The Milk to Todoist to Taskwarrior. Lastly I'd stuck with simple CalDAV tasks, which work just fine for small todos. I can recommend OpenTasks and tasks.org for Android and vdirsyncer plus todoman for CLI. However, taking out a mobile phone to jot down tasks is something I've never felt quite comfortable with; maybe it's the fact that I have to do so many steps: grab phone - unlock - open task app - input task description with mobile keyboard - assign calendar - assign date - save - close phone. I want to jot it down and forget about it, because my my is working on more important things. Having to think about the way I do it is not helpful.

When I started using notebooks and the bullet journal approach I had found something I stuck with longer than any other system before. I optimised it over the years and found it "just works". Just write it down quickly and care about it later. Brilliant! But couldn't I do it in another, motivational new way?

For a long time I've kept my eyes on e-paper devices. I was excited for the possibilities they seemed to offer back in the days before the first iPads. There were prototypes of flexible and even colour e-ink displays, wouldn't they change the way we use notepads and pen and paper in general?

Then Apple introduced the iPad and LCD displays became the norm. Nobody cared about e-paper any more, none of the prototypes seemed to result in anything useful because I guess all the R/D money went into optimising LCD technology. E-ink was reduced to be used in b/w ebook readers and Amazon crushed that market by sheer force, killing off most competitors through subsidized, incredibly cheap devices. They could do that because their revenue came from the ebooks, not the reading devices.

But lately e-paper is coming back, as a digital writing platform. The ReMarkable tablet marketed it brilliantly and other companies followed with their own takes at digitally enhanced notepads. You really don't need a fast, backlit display for writing.

Last year I found the Nova Air by Onyx Boox, which seemed like the first properly usable device for me. It has a full Android system, something I'm comfortable with and it provides me with everything I need to sync my documents, calendar, email and notes. I'm using my own Nextcloud server for this. Having F-Droid is great!

I can't use an iPad or my Galaxy Tab for bullet journalling, even though there's great software to do so, because I like to have my bullet journal open on my desk. Every non-e-paper tablet will turn its screen off or run out of battery really fast. Having an e-paper screen ist great because you don't have to have the backlight on and the screen uses zero energy just displaying my page.

The writing feel on my Nova Air is great, even though I changed the pen because I like the nostalgic look and feel of the Staedtler Norris Jumbo pen. I can read and annotate PDF, my bullet journal notebook is automatically saved, exported to PDF and synchronised with my Nextcloud server. I'll never lose my bullet journal. I've tinkered with different linked calendar templates, but found the simple dotted page layout fits me best - I can use the space as I need it and can dedicate full pages to single topics where needed.

Having used notebooks of roughly the same size as the Nova Air's 7 inch screen, I still find that I'd like to have more space for writing, somehow the digital pen makes me write a little larger than on paper and I miss a two-page layout option. Since the Nova Air doesn't fit into any of my pockets (unlike my paper notebooks), I guess my next device will be bigger (and more expensive, sigh). And even though I've only used two different colours in my traditional bullet journal, I really miss colour on my e-paper device. I can substitute colours with several greys but that's not highlighting, that's greylighting.

I don't think I'll go back to using a paper bullet journal anytime soon. The possibilities of my e-paper tablet are too numerous. It's a super-powered bullet journal with copy+paste and (lately) linking between pages. Maybe in a few years time I'll go for a bigger, colour device. But e-paper it'll be, I'm loving it.

Bullet journalling with an e-paper device

Managing tasks

ePaper

Pros

Cons

Conclusion