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
"Not all accessibility needs are obvious – even someone with vision changes related to aging develops needs over time."
Phil HeskethDesigning Accessible Research Workflows
September 29, 2021
"Eye tracking can show you what people see, in what order, for how long, and crucially, what they don't see."
Jeff Ephraim Bander Ariane Rahn Philipp ReiterEye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research
March 11, 2022
"If we put traffic into the street, we'll get traffic; if we put gardeners, we'll get gardens."
Dan HillStrategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life
April 21, 2022
"Accessibility requires flexible designs, not limited or simplified ones."
Sam ProulxAccessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
September 8, 2022
"Tools are evolving fast; it's crucial to analyze which tools will remain market leaders before heavy integration."
Farid SabitovAutomatization for Large Enterprise Teams
January 8, 2024
"Designers and technical experts should work together as peers to produce the best outcomes in technical assessments."
Ed MullenDesigning the Unseen: Enabling Institutions to Build Public Trust
November 16, 2022
"Packaging your work aligns stakeholders and manages objections instead of hoping the work speaks for itself."
Joe Meersman Pooria SohiUse AI to Drive Outcomes that Go Beyond the Design Sprint
September 25, 2024
"The business doesn’t just want to do design better; they want the outcomes that design can make possible."
Jess GrecoCreating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity
June 8, 2022
"You’re really there to learn because the person with assistive technology is the expert of their setup."
Kavana RameshMeaningful inclusion: Practicing accessibility research with confidence
September 24, 2024