Rosenverse
The Best of Both Worlds: How to Integrate Paper and Digital Notes (1st of 3 seminars)

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

The Best of Both Worlds: How to Integrate Paper and Digital Notes (1st of 3 seminars)

Friday, April 5, 2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Share the love for this talk
The Best of Both Worlds: How to Integrate Paper and Digital Notes (1st of 3 seminars)
Speakers: Jorge Arango
Link:

Summary

Unlock the cognitive benefits of handwriting without losing the convenience of digital organization. Research consistently demonstrates the cognitive value of writing notes by hand. However, there are important benefits to keeping notes digitally. In this seminar by Duly Noted author Jorge Arango, you’ll learn workflows for integrating handwritten notes into your digital notes.   Watch Part 2 Watch Part 3  

Key Insights

  • Note-taking serves different distinct use cases such as prosthetic memory, creative thinking, reading annotation, and lecture capturing, each requiring different approaches.

  • The extended mind hypothesis shows notes and external tools extend cognitive capacity beyond the brain itself.

  • Handwritten notes facilitate deeper flow states and better initial comprehension due to slower writing reducing verbatim capture.

  • Paper notes are resilient, immediate, and long-lasting physically but hard to organize, search, and copy at scale.

  • Digital notes offer superior searchability, organization via tags and links, multimodality, and easy backups, but require more setup and learning.

  • Combining handwritten and digital notes leverages the immediacy and flow benefits of paper with digital organization and findability.

  • Mobile scanning apps like Scanner Pro greatly speed up digitizing handwritten notes with OCR and cloud integration.

  • Using a central digital repository (Obsidian) to store and link all notes, including PDFs of handwritten ones, creates a powerful, emergent graph of knowledge.

  • Tagging should focus on utility and minimalism, like tagging by projects rather than exhaustively describing topics.

  • Beware of over-optimizing note-taking systems; the goal is to enhance effective thinking and work, not just perfect note management.

Notable Quotes

"Note-taking is really important; it's underappreciated but critically important, like interviewing users for a researcher."

"Notes are a way to enhance our thinking, serving different purposes from memory aids to generative creative work."

"We think with things; our brain is part of us but we extend our cognition into our environments and tools."

"Handwritten notes have no boot up time, and that immediacy helps enter deeper flow states."

"People who took notes by hand tend to have better recall than those typing notes because they process information differently."

"Digital notes can be linked to each other to create a graph of ideas that is impossible with linear paper notebooks."

"Scanner Pro automatically corrects perspective and applies filters, making scanning with a phone fast and high quality."

"I resist premature optimization of tagging and structure; I want to be 80% there rather than perfect and distracted."

"The goal is not to take notes; the goal is to think effectively, as Andy Matus says."

"Avoid getting sidetracked by tools and processes so you can focus on the actual work those notes help enable."

Ask the Rosenbot
Sharon Banh
Reimagining research: What does the field need to grow? [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Farid Sabitov
Theme Four Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Sarah Sgarlato Pierini
From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Joseph Williams
Unlocking impact and influence through inclusive hiring in research
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Rebecca Gimenez
Work in Progress: Service Design at Airbnb
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Christian Crumlish
Morning Insights Panel
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Shipra Kayan
Make your research synthesis speedy and more collaborative using a canvas
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Sarah Barrett
AI in Real Life: Using LLMs to Turbocharge Microsoft Learn
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Tatyana Mamut
Opening Keynote: Breaking Conway's Law--or How to Work Differently and Not Ship Your Org Chart
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Spencer L. A. Stultz
Why Social Justice Frameworks are Necessary for Successful DEI/JEDI Initiatives
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Brianna Sylver
Lead With Purpose
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Jules Monza
Use These Words and Count These Things
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Shazia Ali
Communication: Innovative techniques for making your voice heard [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Giff Constable
Financial fluency for product leaders: AMA with Giff Constable
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Zen Ren
Taking Inspiration from Instructional Design for Research
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Turning UX Passion into Real Product Influence
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold

More Videos

Uday Gajendar

"You have to build something, ship something, and make something especially when dealing with hundreds of thousands of objects."

Uday Gajendar

Theme 1: Introduction

June 9, 2021

Sara Conklin

"Don’t cold reach out to people with ‘let’s connect’; instead, ask very specific questions about topics they care about."

Sara Conklin

A UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility

June 26, 2025

Bria Alexander

"You don’t want to miss out on the sponsor sessions — they’re free and high quality, not sales pitches."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

November 18, 2022

Jayne Engle

"Cities are not at the heart of global climate discussions, yet they hold tremendous opportunity for change."

Jayne Engle Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook

Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics

August 25, 2022

Lija Hogan

"Financial services companies in the UK are working to make credit and loan approvals more equitable."

Lija Hogan

Practical Principles of Inclusive Research

March 27, 2023

Ted Neward

"Our consultant says we should pivot from business to dog to business to business—what do we do?"

Ted Neward

Theme 4: Enterprise Organizational Journey

June 4, 2019

Sheryl Cababa

"People who understand the problem best are set up to do the best work."

Sheryl Cababa

Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset

June 6, 2023

Kevin M. Hoffman

"Thou art community, connection, and meaning – the product is not just code or design, it is a shared experience between humans and dogs."

Kevin M. Hoffman

Theme 2: Enterprise Team Journey

June 3, 2019

Dave Hora

"Research evangelization is the highest rated in usefulness among researchers with over 12 years’ experience."

Dave Hora

A Research Skills Evolution

March 10, 2021