What's happening to us? The Remarkable 2, Obsedian, The Brain, Moleskine Balance and blending analogue and digital
Stationery FreaksShow Notes
In this episode we talk about what's happening to us - as we find digital tooling becoming more important in our stationery world. We talk about the Remarkable 2, Moleskine balance and how we are still stationery freaks! And Rob is retooling his knowledge management and Helen learned nothing about herself, despite sticker journaling for a few weeks.
We cover: Woolsthorpe manor, where Isaac Newton saw the apple fall - and the fact you can buy pens made from the very tree that Newton saw the apple fall from Rob's bought a Remarkable - will he send it back? Rob's doing a workshop in Romania - and has bought hundreds of stickers for an immersive workshop Helen's been using the Moleskine Balance app to track habits, mood etc. The interface is calming and clean - she is enjoying Helen is using Bullet Journaling more for work than personal - due to working from home more often and "closing down the day" Rob's been researching tooling for a Personal Knowledge Management System - and was spending more time fiddling with the system than learning. Helen is using Obsidian, Rob uninstalled it after 10 minutes. Rob talks about The Brain as a PKMS. It's an awesome tool - but pricey, and would require a big on-going financial investment. Helen has been sticker journaling about her mood and energy levels, and tracking this using stickers. What did she learn about herself? Absolutely nothing by all accounts. Zero insights. Nothing. Nada Rob talks about using Zotero and the Remarkable as his new PKMS Rob talks through why he's bought the Remarkable 2, and how it fits into his ecosystem of learning and note taking. At the moment, he's keeping it, but there is a 100 day returns promise Helen's not convinced about the Remarkable. Truth be told, Rob isn't either. Find more episodes and subscribe to the newsletter at www.stationeryfreaks.com
More from Stationery Freaks
After a few months away — and a very welcome "petition of one" from Stacy in Florida — Rob and Helen are back. Rob has been building a public commonplace: twenty-five years of learning, typed onto index cards (possibly breaking his typewriter in the process) and slowly taking over his studio wall. Helen has been redistributing her notebook collection to a room of grateful authors, which may or may not count as cheating in the great notebook challenge. See original hoarding cast here and a revisit to the challenge of using notebooks here. Along the way: why old publishing offices were built around attention rather than productivity, a typewritten daily planning ritual that's quietly replaced Todoist, the strange magnetism of Midori paper, a beautiful Japanese storage haul, giving away index cards to parents and why the whole world seems to be drifting back to analogue. It's like old times. Which is rather the point of the cast. It's good to be back. If you'd like to see images, and more about the show - check out the companion newsletter to this episode. https://stationeryfreaks.substack.com/
In this episode of Stationery Freaks, Rob and Helen dig into the messy, essential world of scrap notes: desk pads, Post-its, legal pads, envelopes, voice memos, and the “grab whatever’s nearby” capture habit. They explore the real question beneath the stationery: what’s the process for turning a quick note into something useful — and what happens when your capture system becomes a pile of open loops.
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It’s the last Stationery Freaks episode before Christmas, and after a slightly chaotic month we’re back with a free-form catch-up full of notebook temptation, planning experiments, and advent calendar joy. Helen reviews two very premium stationery advent calendars — Martha Brook(s) and Tom’s Studio — including what you actually get, which one feels more “decorative vs functional,” and the one item she absolutely refuses to touch (again). Rob shares his new structured SmartPlanner time-blocking experiment (and why he’s moved from pen to pencil), an everyday-carry bag confession featuring nine notebooks, and an early idea he’s calling The Wallpaper Method: learning notes on a giant scroll. We also chat about “analog wellbeing,” why January is peak notebook season, end-of-year reflection (hello, Collins ledger), and what we’ll be tackling in the first episode of 2026.