Category Archives: Note Taking

Page-o-Mat Can Make Smartnote Page Templates

In 2024, I used my tool, Page-o-Mat, to make a PDF journal for my Smartnote. It worked fine, but there was no way to insert pages or add more internal (or external) linking to a PDF on Smartnote.

I think a better way to use the Smartnote is to use the native .note format, though, not a PDF. This format supports template pages, and luckily, you can put the Smartnote template pages in a PDF, so it’s possible to do that with Page-o-Mat. This lets me use all of the features of the Smartnote, but still have pages that have spaces to fill in.

I have to think through what I want in my template pages, but I’ll share the configs and PDFs when I make them. If you already have ideas, go check out Page-o-Mat on GitHub.

How Digital Journaling is Better Than Paper

Yesterday, I wrote about How Digital Journaling Is Worse Than Paper, and today I want to write about how it was better.

I use the Supernote Manta. It’s better than paper for me in these ways:

It’s a lot easier to carry (slim and light). This will be especially true as I build up annual journals in it.
It also has my Kindle, so I don’t need to carry that in addition.
I never run out of ink.
I can make my pen have various thicknesses and shades.
You can undo and edit.

#5 is the reason I can’t give up digital journaling. This was not part of my criteria when I was deciding on this a year ago, but I could not live without it now.

Also, I don’t use this feature, but it has OCR, which makes the journals searchable. I do like that I could use it later.

How Digital Journaling Is Worse Than Paper

In 2025, I used my Manta Supernote, and I didn’t journal in it daily. I always have lulls in my year with less daily journaling, but the lull was bigger this time. I don’t know if it was having an electronic journal or if there was something about the year.

But, I’m willing to try it again. Here are my observations on what was worse about a digital journal:

I have a page for each day and more pages for planning and retros, so the journal is over 400 pages. It’s hard to navigate that (compared to a physical book).
I used a PDF, not the native Supernote format, which makes it impossible to change the structure of the journal. Supernote supports page management and internal linking for its native format.
The Supernote is nice looking, but not as nice looking as my paper journals.
I journal in Black and Red, which isn’t possible on a Supernote.

So, this time

I am going to use the internal Supernote format for the journal. I think you can make custom template pages, which I will look into.
I will need to use internal linking liberally to make the journal easier to navigate.
I will use highlighting more to take the place of the red pen, which is mostly to draw attention to something.
I need to find triggers and sources of motivation to get me to journal more regularly.

Why even do this? Tomorrow, I’ll write about How Digital Journaling is Better Than Paper.

Interleaved Reading

After graduating college, my book choices have been self-determined, and for a long time, I read them serially. This is weird because up until then I was always reading more than one book at time (by necessity).

But, a few years ago, while researching learning methods and incorporating spaced-repetition (i.e. flash cards) into my life, I saw a recommendation to interleave reading. The idea is simple: You read more than one book at a time. This might be obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me. It was liberating.

One problem of reading a book all the way through is that you don’t have time to consider a chapter before moving on. When you interleave books, you have time to ruminate on them in the background. Better than that, you can use spaced-repetition to build flash cards that you practice before moving on. Then, while you are reading, the older chapters are periodically shown to you, reinforcing the whole book as you read.

Another exercise is to write your own synthesis of the chapter, applying it to your personal interests. This kind of note can be a blog post or a page in your Digital Zettelkasten. Over time, these original thoughts might build up to something bigger. For me, it was my book.

Finally, I read a lot of books that are meant to be used, not just read. They offer their own exercises. For example, here’s a post about the way I use The Artist’s Way, a quintessentially useful book, which encourages you to read a chapter a week and then do some work.

Before I did this, retention was hard. Now, it’s effortless (a few minutes a day in Anki) or the effort is welcome (it generates a blog post). But, it does mean I put books down intentionally, and so I need a different one to read while I work on retaining the first one.

(I meant to write about what I’m currently reading today, but I thought it would be good to write about this first so I can reference it. I’ll get to my current reading list tomorrow)

Supernote Manta: Review at Eight Weeks

I’ve been using the Supernote Manta as my exclusive object for taking notes and reading e-books for eight weeks. This review is a follow-up to Supernote Manta First Impressions and Supernote Manta: Review at Four Weeks.

Before choosing the Manta, my requirements for an electronic writing device were:

It had to be hard to use the machine for anything but reading and writing because I want it to be more like factory equipment.
It had to have a long battery life (like the Kindle).
It had to be easy to get files to and from the device (unlike the Kindle).
It had to be able to read Kindle books.
It had to be readable in sunlight (I live in Florida and read at the beach).
It had to be A5-sized.

It has delivered on all of these requirements, but there are some disappointments (as I mentioned in past reviews), with the main one being that the on-screen keyboard is terrible.

But there are other issues. For context, here is how I currently use the Supernote.

I made a PDF journal using My 2025 Journal PDF for Supernote A5. I write in this daily.
I use the Kindle app on the Supernote for all e-book reading.
I make new notes all of the time for various ad-hoc uses. Each of these becomes the start of new kind of dedicated journal. For example, my wife and I have a monthly “family meeting” to discuss our finances—my notes are now all together in a note file. Previously, they were spread throughout my paper daily journal.

So, I have to manage a bunch of files, which isn’t great on the Supernote. It has a very “functional” file manager, but it’s bare-bones. Now that I have a lot of files, I am running into limitations.

The first problem is that I didn’t think through a folder and file naming strategy before making notes, and now I just have a bunch of randomly named files. I would like to rename them, but the keyboard is so janky, that I have just put it off. On a Mac, this would take less than a minute, but it will just be frustrating on the Supernote.

Related to that, when you take the “New Note” icon, you can’t see the folders or other files. So (as far as I can see), you can’t put the new note in a folder with the shortcut and if you have a naming scheme, you aren’t reminded of it by seeing the other files. This dialog uses the entire screen, so there’s plenty of room to show the folders and files (like any typical “Save as…” dialog).

Another issue is that I can’t reliably lasso an area (select objects by drawing an outline around them). It’s a two-finger gesture in the corner along with using the stylus, but most of the time I do it, the stylus draws the shape instead of lassoing the objects. After a few tries, I do it accidentally—I have not figured out how to do it reliably, but also, I have not investigated this to find out if I am doing the gesture and pen movement as documented. It feels like I am getting worse at this over time.

This all being said, I am very happy with the Supernote. I use it all of the time. As I was writing this post, the Supernote asked to update itself. So, I hope that they addressed some of these issues. The keyboard is mostly a speed issue, so hopefully, not hard to improve.

Make a Space For Each Day in Your Journal

One thing I have learned in the last two years is that I am much more likely to write in my journal each day if it has a pre-designated space for each day.

In my Recurring Journals I split each open spread of two-pages into quadrants and then put corresponding dates from each 13-week “quarter” in them. So, the first page of 2024 had the Mondays: January 1 and April 1 on the left-hand side and July 1 and September 30 on the right-hand side. The next two-page spread had the Tuesdays: January 2, April 2, July 2, and October 1. I explained why I do this in My Year in Weeks, but the important thing is that every day had a space.

Having a space for each day made it much more likely that I would write something in that space. Even if I missed a day, I went back and recreated it. I did this even when I missed a few days. And because it was a recurring journal, when I got to the end of The First 13 Weeks, I went back to the first page and went through each spread again for The Second 13 Weeks. If I noticed a blank space in the past, I would see if I had any way to recreate what happened that day (from my calendar, git logs, blogs, etc).

This year (2025), I am not going to be using a recurring format, but I am still using pre-dated pages. I will have to be more diligent about checking the previous days, but my weekly retro pages will probably be good enough to make me do that.

Supernote Manta First Impressions

I got my Supernote Manta (A5) two days ago. I haven’t used it much—mostly learning the UI and getting an idea of the features. Mostly, I wanted to get my own 2025 planner on that I made with Page-o-Mat and then get to planning 2025.

Generally, I like it and I still think it is the best choice given my preferences. Here are a bunch of unstructured impressions.

The on-screen keyboard is bad. I hope this can get better in software. Luckily, I think of this as a writing device and won’t want to type much. When I have to, it’s painful.
I wish I could give files names with handwriting (because typing is so bad)
The pen/paper feel is really good—even better than I expected.
The pen doesn’t perfectly make marks all of the time, but no worse than real pens.
The left and right sidebar gestures are ingenious.
Inside of their notes, you can make links to other pages and notes, but you can’t do this inside a PDF. Since standard PDF Annotations supports this, I hope it comes in a software update—I would use that journalling.
I use a passcode to lock the device. I would love it if I could put contact info on that screen so that the journal could be returned if I lost it.

Everything else is as widely reported in reviews. It’s a thoughtful device. I appreciate that I can upgrade the hardware and the software is generally high-quality so far. I am looking forward to having this device for many years.

My Year in Weeks

I released my 2025 Journal PDF (for Supernote) yesterday, and in the middle of describing it, I realized that I have never explained how I plan my year around weeks and 13-week blocks. There are mentions of it in a few posts, but nothing canonical.

I use a week as my main planning timespan, not months or quarters. Additionally, I use Monday as the first day of the week, which is normal for a lot of the world, but not Americans. When I think of how a week flows, the Saturday and Sunday are a unit. I think of them as the start of the week, but almost no software will let you do that, so I got used to them being at the end.

So, all of my projects are estimated in terms of weeks, and I program in sprints that are a multiple of weeks. Then, I split the year into four 13-weeks “quarters”, which is close to a year (364 days). This year, 2024, started on a Monday, and because it was a leap year, April 1 and July 1 were exactly on 13-week boundaries (Oct 1 was only a day off), so my system correlated to normal quarters about as well as it ever could. This doesn’t happen again until 2052. I hope I am there to see it and that I still care.

My journal is set up to follow the flow of a week. Days of the week tend to be similar to each other—so, there is a feel to a Monday, a Tuesday, a Sunday, etc. But March 3rd will not be like April 3rd or October 3rd. A lot of recurring meetings are weekly or bi-weekly, or on the “Third Thursday of the Month” or some other pattern that works well with my system.

When a year doesn’t start on a Monday, I have to incorporate some of the previous year into it. For me, 2025 starts on December 30, 2024. I usually start my yearly goals in the previous year just to get a running start, so it doesn’t really matter if a few extra days get into my journal.

If I have to deal with something that is on a month or quarter boundary, they are just a regular day in the journal. External deadlines can be on any day.

If this sounds good to you, you can use my 2025 Journal (PDF).

My 2025 Journal PDF for Supernote A5

I finished adding features to Page-o-Mat to support the journal I wanted to make for 2025 to use on a Supernote Manta. I fixed some bugs and added the following features:

Internal Links to pages: This is supported in titles, section titles, and rectangles
Start/End Dates on Pages: This is so I can show a date range in a title
More support for using expressions as values: This is so I could calculate a page link inside a loop or do more date math.

My Journals do not use heavily templated pages—Most pages are nearly blank, but they have a 5mm dot grid on them. You could do bullet-style journaling, sketches, or whatever you like.

The main opinionated thing I do is that my year is based around four 13-week “Quarters”, not the months or the typical quarters, and my weeks start on a Monday.

So, 2025 starts on Monday, December 30, 2024 and goes to Sunday, December 28, 2025. I did add on the week after, though so that Dec 29-31 are in the Journal (and the rest of that week). The full 2025 journal is 53 weeks with a little of 2024 at the beginning and a little of 2026 at the end.

Download my 2025 Journal

Since this was created with Page-o-Mat, you could customize it and make your own. See the config file in /config/2025-journal.yaml in the repo. The script uses Python—I added installation instructions to the README.

EDIT: More explanation of my system in My Year in Weeks

Page-o-Mat Updates for Electronic Journals

I wrote Page-o-Mat because I had an idea for a paper journal that I wanted to make. I could have just made a PDF, but making each page was a repetitive task that was easier to do with code. I could have just made a python script to make just that journal, but I was still designing the journal, so I put some configuration in a YAML file. Once I did that, the config grew to the point that it became a language for making journals. I made my 2023 journal with it and got it printed by LuLu.

In mid 2023, I wanted to make a different kind of journal (one for writing Morning Pages), and so I added some features to draw shapes on pages, which I also used to make covers. Later that year, I made my 2024 journal with it without needing more features. I hadn’t touched it since then.

I like my custom paper journals, but they are thick and heavy, so I am trying something different for 2025. I finally found an E-Ink tablet that I can use to replace my Kindle and get a more portable writing/journaling solution too.

I’ve been looking at E-Ink writable tablets. After considering the Kindle Scribe, Daylight, and Remarkable, I decided that I cared about a few things:

It had to be hard to use the machine for anything but reading and writing because I want it to be more like factory equipment.
It had to have a long battery life (like the Kindle).
It had to be easy to get files to and from the device (unlike the Kindle).
It had to be able to read Kindle books.
It had to be readable in sunlight (I live in Florida and read at the beach).
It had to be A5-sized.

The only device I found that met all of these criteria was something that Supernote used to make and said they would make again. I signed up for updates and waited. Then, I forgot it existed. I almost got a Daylight in the meantime, which is a nice device, but it’s too nice—it can easily run any Android software, so it’s too general purpose. I want a “worse is better” machine.

But a few weeks ago, I got an email from Supernote that the A5 is available, so I bought one—it arrives later today. In the meantime, I’ve been reading more about its capabilities, and I see that I can make my own planner for it by just bringing over a PDF, which is what Page-o-Mat produces.

I could make one just like my 2023/2024 planners right now with Page-o-Mat, but one of the advantages of an electronic journal is internal linking. So, I could be looking at a page of all months, tap and jump to a month overview, then tap and jump to a day overview (and back). All you need to do is add tappable zones to the PDF that link to a page.

So, yesterday, I added simple support for that to Page-o-Mat and pushed up the change along with a simple example.

This won’t be enough for my 2025 journal, but helped me get back into the codebase again. I have a week to get the features in so I can make a journal and use it on January 1st.