Going Paperless

Shortly after I began attending Stevens, I began to grow interested in organizing and other life hacks that would give me an edge in class and relieve myself of some of the stress that comes with higher education. Originally this interest started mildly enough, a few Moleskines here, a couple of accordion folders there. Once I got a smartphone however, and became more and more interested in how apps could improve my life, my interest in organizing quickly became a quest to achieve organizational nirvana: going paperless. This post is about that journey, how far along I've come to reaching that goal, and the problems and successes I've encountered along the way.

To go paperless you need software to replace all that paper, and for me that is Evernote. Evernote bills itself as software for "remembering everything", and that is exactly what it is for, everything. Evernote, and the paperless "lifestyle", really shine when you fully commit to using it. Although most people understand Evernote to be a note taking application, it is really much more than that, and users looking to use it as a replacement for "Notes" on their iPhone will likely find the software difficult to use.

Basically Evernote provides you with notes and notebooks. Notebooks act like folders, and notes like documents. Notes can be traditional text notes, or audio recordings, images, video, hand drawn notes, computer files, and even web pages. What's great about Evernote is that it is everywhere, from browser extensions to a web app, desktop software and mobile apps for every phone out there. Each of these devices contains all of your content by syncing through the cloud, and this enables you to put literally everything into Evernote. If you're at a museum researching French paintings, you can take pictures of works you'd like to use for your research. Those images will automatically be on your desktop computer when you get home. If you find an interesting article you read online, you can use the extension to save it into your account. Say you were a history of technology professor writing a book about cars. Over the years you likely read tons of articles and blog posts on cars. If all of those articles had been saved into Evernote, and you forgot where an article you read was from when you wanted to refer back to it for your book, you'd be able to search your entire personal database of knowledge that you've collected in your Evernote. It's like having superhuman memory. Search is one of the best features of Evernote and going paperless, and even scanned paper documents in your Evernote are searchable.

This is how it works for me right now,  I have Evernote on my desktop, laptop, iPad, smartphone, and even my TV. Specifically keeping the conversation focused on school, I use my laptop to take the majority of my in class notes. My smartphone is for quickly taking note of something when I am away from my computers, and I use my iPad for reading notes when I study and want to get away from my desktop or relax on the couch. Everything from class, except actual assignments, goes into a specific notebook for class. This is great, especially towards the end of the semester and finals when the amount of material to go through gets rather enormous. No matter where I am, so long as I have at least my smartphone, I have access to everything from the syllabus to the final exam review notes.

As most students know however, not every professor is exactly on board with the idea of allowing students to use laptops during lecture. As someone legitimately taking notes on it, this sucks. This forces me to use a traditional paper notebook (currently I am using a Rhodia Spiral Bound A4), and then ultimately rip out each page and scan it into Evernote at the end of the week. This is time consuming, inelegant, and expensive. When I first committed to doing this, I used the original Doxie Scanner, which is a decent and relatively cheap portable scanner. My biggest issue with it was that it could only take one page at a time, which almost made the task of scanning my notes into Evernote not worth the effort. I finally resolved this issue last summer and purchased a Canon P-150, which has a document feed for up to 30 pages and can also do front and back pages (another huge advantage over the Doxie).

Still though, this isn't ideal. It takes little effort for me to scan pages into my computer, but being paperless has always been about doing away with paper all together. Besides the issues with classroom policy, in some classes paper remained the best way to do things just because of how difficult typing mathematical symbols is on computers. Since the iPad came out, I have been long hoping that I could one day resolve this problem by using a tablet and a stylus. My experience with that has mostly been a series of expensive failures. Originally I held out for Android tablets, since I am majorly invested in the Google ecosystem and already had an Android phone. I was there on day one with Motorola's Xoom, and until very recently the Nexus 10. For two years Android never became iOS in terms of the tablet experience, no matter how much I hoped. No exceptional handwriting apps ever came to the platform, despite the numerous ones that existed for iPad.

During this time I occasionally had access to a few iPads as I received them second hand from my father. When this was the case I finally had the apps I needed, but writing on a screen was not what I had hoped for. This is because modern tablets are made with capacitive screens, made for fingers, not for stylus. As such, every stylus on the market will include a thick felt "nub" as the tip, about six times larger than even a large pencil tip. The experience is something like trying to write something in detail with a fat magic marker that is losing ink. (And yes, I know that tablets like the Samsung Galaxy series include a digitizer stylus to completely resolve this issue, but I cannot stand those devices and there was no way they'd ever be an option).

Evernote has stepped in itself to remedy that situation. Just last week they released the Jot Script in collaboration with Adonit. The Script is a, rather expensive, capacitive stylus with a tip .9 mm wide, exactly the size pencil lead I use. It is battery powered and connects to an iPad via Bluetooth so that handwriting apps can better understand the correct position of the hand and differentiate that input from the touch input coming from the user's palm resting on the screen. I was on board immediately picked up an iPad Air and the Script with high hopes that it would answer my prayers. After a week of linear algebra notes on the tablet, I'm happy to say that it is kinda weird but awesome. It's not perfect, and it is weird writing on glass instead of paper, but now I can carry one device for everything, including taking handwritten notes. Everything is automatically synced with Evernote, and all of it is searchable on any one of my devices. The only remaining issue is whether or not professors who do not allow laptops will be ok with a notebook that happens to have an LCD screen. I at least hope Vinsel will say yes.