Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s 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)
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"It took competitors over seven years to catch up to Apple’s accessibility features like Siri, dark mode, and multitouch."
Sam ProulxTo Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
September 9, 2022
"Search alone doesn’t cut it, particularly when people don’t know what they’re looking for or lack context."
Jorge ArangoScale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies
September 24, 2024
"Impact of research is not always immediate or linear; it can be a long-term, complex process to measure."
Taylor KlassmanShaping the Next Era of UX Research: Collaborative Forum
March 11, 2025
"Three million people access this information through the Benefits Hub every month, often multiple times."
Alan Williams Rose DeebDesigning essential financial services for those in need
February 10, 2022
"You would never implement an algorithm on a doctor without speaking to them, but in hospitality, it’s done to workers all the time."
Jodi ForlizziDesign and AI innovation
June 5, 2024
"Enterprise is kind of sexy because big, hairy, hard problems of scale and distribution live at the enterprise."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldWelcome
January 8, 2024
"Proactive measurement before release combined with post-release evaluation is the ideal approach."
Jack MoffettUX Metrics That Matter and The Future of our Design at Scale Conference: A Community Conversation
September 22, 2022
"Every meeting now should be treated as if it’s fully remote to avoid creating uneven hybrid experiences."
Jennifer Bolduc Diane Gregorio Emily DayWhat's involved with getting people back to work?: A panel discussion
July 1, 2021
"It couldn’t find specific interviewees for user archetypes, so I had to adapt and guide the process."
Yulya Besplemennova[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis
June 4, 2024
