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
Alla Weinberg
Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Noreen Whysel
Short Take #4: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Billy Carlson
Principles of Team Wireframing
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Sha Hwang
The Lost Year
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jayne Engle
Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics
2022 • Civic Design Community
Nancy Douyon
We'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Ryan Rumsey
Business Influence Without Losing Your Soul
2021 • Enterprise Community
Jack Behar
How to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Kristin Skinner
Opening Keynote: Org Design for Design Orgs
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Adam Thomas
Survival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Patrizia Bertini
The (r)evolution of designOps: It’s Time to Think (really) BIG
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Mitchell Bernstein
Organizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Kathleen Asjes
Research Democratization: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
John Mortimer
Panel Discussion
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Laine Riley Prokay
Carving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold

More Videos

Sam Ladner

"Rigour really is just a method; it’s knowing why you made the choices and tradeoffs you did."

Sam Ladner

How Research Can Drive Strategic Foresight

March 9, 2022

Mark Templeton

"The hardest thing for any tech company to do is move from technology-out thinking to customer and business outcome thinking."

Mark Templeton

Creating a Legacy: the ultimate experience

June 9, 2017

Cheryl Platz

"Improv isn't about being funny; honesty and storytelling matter much more."

Cheryl Platz

Merging Improv with Design

March 7, 2019

Cennydd Bowles

"I'm basically a philosopher because 50% of people don't know what an ethicist is."

Cennydd Bowles

Exit Interview #2: Rediscovering the ethical heart of design

November 6, 2025

Alexis Lucio

"Accessibility is innovation and this statement could potentially be some unchecked ableism."

Alexis Lucio

Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems

June 9, 2022

Nalini P. Kotamraju

"The success of SLDS is not about the technology itself but about people and relationships."

Nalini P. Kotamraju

An Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System

June 9, 2016

Theresa Marwah

"We use Zoom waiting rooms to anonymize observers and create space for private consent conversations."

Theresa Marwah

How Atlassian is Operationalizing Respect in Research

February 27, 2020

Cara Maritz

"Secondary research is a way to respect your target population's time and efforts rather than constantly dipping into them for research."

Cara Maritz Rachel Ny

The Art of Extrapolation

March 29, 2023

Vicky Teinaki

"Even if you had designed it, I wouldn’t have prioritized it."

Vicky Teinaki Michele Marut Tim Parmee

Short Take #3: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers

December 6, 2022