Rosenverse

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
Pippa Lomas
Paving the Path for Neurodiversity in Design
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Kristin Taylor
Building Bridges Across Organizational Silos
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Ian Swinson
Designing and Driving UX Careers
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Kristin Skinner
8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
2020 • DesignOps Community
Brigette Metzler
Scaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Jorge Arango
Exploding the Notebook: How to Unlock the Power of Linked Notes (2nd of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
How UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Shelby Switzer
Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Tina Weisser
When AI Agents Meet Reality. Service Design Lessons from a Pilot
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Chris Hodowanec
Agile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Melissa Tsang
From Insights to Action: Driving Business Values through DesignOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Cornelius Rachieru
Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Christian Rohrer
Insight Types That Influence Enterprise Decision Makers
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Lavy Kumar
Future of Work
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Emilia Åström
Unlock Your Team’s Intelligence with Collaboration Design
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Hands-on AI #1: Let’s write your first AI eval
2025 • Rosenfeld Community

More Videos

Molly Fargotstein

"Our definition of UX research connects the dots and helps fellow peeps make smart, strategic decisions by collecting insights directly from users."

Molly Fargotstein

Multipurpose Communication & UX Research Marketing

September 12, 2019

Matt Duignan

"Product teams want quick, grab-and-go research results, but reusable insights are more abstract and take longer to digest."

Matt Duignan

Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap

March 30, 2020

Amy Paris

"People use gender and sex interchangeably, but as identities evolve, that creates complications for medical and benefit forms."

Amy Paris Danielle Thierry

Delivering Equity: Government Services for All Ages, Languages, Sexual Orientations, and Gender Identities

December 9, 2021

Sofia Quintero

"Introducing change is introducing stress and fear and feelings of rejection."

Sofia Quintero

Beyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories

March 10, 2022

Dorelle Rabinowitz

"Bring people along on a journey. Lead people towards your side by focusing on the future state."

Dorelle Rabinowitz

The Magic Word is Trust

June 15, 2018

Greg Petroff

"The rocking chair test helps you evaluate if you’re living a life you won’t regret when you’re old."

Greg Petroff

Design is the Differentiator: Bringing New Design Innovations to a Very Antiquated and Very Large Industry

June 9, 2021

Vincent Brathwaite

"Collaboration among technologists, ethicists, and healthcare professionals is key."

Vincent Brathwaite

Opener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams

October 22, 2020

Sarah Flamion

"People make decisions with limited information, especially about more distant parts of the system."

Sarah Flamion

Complex Problem? Add Clarity by Combining Research and Systems Thinking

March 31, 2020

Carla Casariego

"We really had to go into it with an adaptable mindset and know when to drink the potion or eat the cake to grow or shrink."

Carla Casariego Sarah Spencer

DesignOps in Wonderland

October 24, 2019