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
"Slowing down with research can help us move faster overall."
Kristen Guth, Ph.D.Out of the FOG: A Non-traditional Research Approach to Alignment
March 28, 2023
"We want to feel valued and find satisfaction in our daily work."
Kit UngerTheme 1 Intro
June 8, 2022
"Disability is the only identity that all of us will probably adopt at some point during our lives."
Sam ProulxAccessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
June 8, 2022
"Awareness of positionality is the first step toward ethical change in research."
Bilan HashiThe Tension Between Story Collecting and Story Telling in Research
March 10, 2021
"A designer working on a new component needs to understand not just that component but the templates using it and overall approach."
Jon Fukuda Ellie KryslDesign Planning and Management Support
October 3, 2023
"Change isn’t disliked as much as the surprise that comes with it—managing expectations makes change more palatable."
Dan Mall“Ask Me Anything” with Dan Mall, Author of Upcoming Rosenfeld Title, Design that Scales
October 2, 2023
"We want to foster a partnership between researchers and AI to enhance human expertise, not supplant it."
Taylor KlassmanThe Evolution of UX Research Platforms
March 10, 2026
"The behaviors act as a gauge, not a scorecard, to see who is struggling and who is thriving."
Johnny MichaelsenMeasure Behaviors, Not Results
April 23, 2026
"The title of the talk is a misnomer: this work isn't actually that fast and shouldn't be done without fear of consequences."
Kaitlin TaskerFast and Fearless Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
