How about a middle ground? I've been looking into the new generation of eink devices that are great for notetaking. Remarkable etc
Best of both worlds and no more dead trees
But we are not including the running electricity emissions of of the Remarkable, plus the co2 emissions of their cloud service. Plus electronics produce a lot dirtier pollution on disposal than paper.
I taught 4 courses this year, plus research work. And I think I got through about 500 sheets of notes. If I had a Remarkable, it would maybe last 4-5 years. I think lifetime pollution from a tablet like Remarkable is always going to be more than from just using paper.
[1] https://newzik.com/blog/ipad-environmental-report/
[2] https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/good-stats-on-carbon-saving/
A better middle ground is probably one of those smart pens that automatically digitizes your scribbles, while you’re still using a paper notebook.
In a physical notebook it’s trivial to flip back a few pages to recall a note from last week. On remarkable that takes a lot more time, and the time cost is paid twice, once for finding the old note, and a second time to get back to the page I was writing. (Imagine working in a single browser window fullscreen without tabs).
I’m still looking for an optimal flow. And I’m gravitating towards something that can ingest remarkable pages, perform OCR and categorise/index the results.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...
Shelved because I realized 1) This will be much more comfortable on forthcoming (cheaper) AR glasses than on one's phone, and 2) I still don't know how to code, but I imagine that this particular UX problem will shortly be one that is no longer insurmountable.
Currently using a pen and paper system that's not dissimilar to bullet-journaling, but adapted to play nicer with unescapable digital calendars etc.
Doesn't paper comes mostly from managed forests? Or maybe you attach a higher value to the life of trees than most people? (which is fine, just surprising to me)