hyperpaper newsletter #4

After a long hiatus, it's good to be back. September is, for many of us, a time of transition, new routines, and more activities and commitments than we can fit in our brains. I hope the templates and articles below give you some useful tools and perspectives to deal with whatever you’ve got going on.

📓 Introducing the hyperpaper notebook

You likely know hyperpaper for the planner, which I've worked on since 2021. There's finally a follow-up, which I’m calling the hyperpaper notebook. It's a customizable pdf with most of the templates you love from the planner, but none of the date pages. This means it can be re-used many times across each of your projects/clients/courses/etc. As a thank you to my customers and subscribers, get a 50% discount on the notebook with the coupon code redacted - subscribers only at checkout.

👟 Getting a Move on

Several of you have asked about the new reMarkable Paper Pro Move, wondering if I am building something for it. The answer is yes, I’m adapting as many of my templates to that screen size as possible. If you’d like to try my work-in-progress, reply to this email and I’ll send you the pdf. Once it’s ready, I’ll release a free version for the rest of 2025, then see if it makes sense to make it a fully-fledged customizable product.

📖 The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

This was the best book I read this summer. A wide-ranging historical survey of how humans have used paper to augment their brains over the last hundreds of years, I couldn’t put it down and it gave me many new ideas.

🔗 How and why to keep a Commonplace book

The aforementioned book has a chapter on the history of “commonplacing”. Here’s a long-form exploration from Ryan Holiday on how its mechanics and benefits. I use Quotes and Book Notes collections to bring this process into my own planner. Ask me if you’re interested in a new template specifically for book notes, I have one on the way!

🔗 I deleted my second brain

The Venn diagram of Obsidian users and hyperpaper customers has a lot of overlap. Here's an interesting perspective – can cataloguing everything in a Second Brain be a source of anxiety, and hold back your creativity?

🔗 Notes on managing ADHD

I don’t have (diagnosed) ADHD, but this sweeping post will resonate with any knowledge worker– for its insights on procrastination, time management, and task tracking. Your process may look nothing like the author's, but still he unspools many interesting threads to pull on. A few choice quotes:

There’s a paradox with productivity: when you grind executive function enough, things that you used to struggle with become quotidian. And so what was once the ceiling becomes the new floor. You no longer feel proud that you did X, Y, Z because that’s just the new normal. It’s like the hedonic treadmill. You might feel that you never get to “productive”. Journaling helps to combat this because you can see how far you’ve come.

Every task falls into one of two categories: the quick wins, and everything else. Life is not made of quick wins. Creative, generative, open-ended work requires long periods of focused work. A lot of unpleasant, aversion-causing things have to be done. But the quick wins are infinite: there’s always some micro-chore to do around the house, for example.