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
Nalini P. Kotamraju
Two Jobs in One: Being a “Leader who is a Researcher” and a “Researcher who is a Leader"
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Richard Buchanan
Creativity and Principles in the Flourishing Enterprise
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
George Aye
That Quiet Little Voice: When Design and Ethics Collide
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Alnie Figueroa
The Future of Design Operations: Transforming Our Craft
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Caitlyn Hampton
Compass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Amy Parness
Scaling Sustainability: Complementary strategies that drive long-term success
2025 • Climate UX Interest Group
Brad Orego
Bringing Customer Research to More Internal Teams
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Alfred Kahn
A Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Lily Aduana
5 Reasons to Bring Your Recruiting in-House (and How To Do It)
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Ariel Kennan
Civic Design in 2022
2022 • Civic Design Community
Jill Fruchter
Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher's Role is to Stay Curious
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Sharbani Dhar
Breathing Room for Delight
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
David Conrad
The Feeling of Data
2023 • Enterprise Community
Mujtaba Hameed
The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Jennifer Strickland
Adopting a "Design By" Method
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Dana Bishop
2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold

More Videos

Zariah Cameron

"When we protect our rest, we also protect our dreaming."

Zariah Cameron

ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace

September 23, 2024

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Nothing about us without us is the mantra we embrace when doing inclusive design operations."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

DesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility

May 26, 2022

Jim Kalbach

"Most former extremists don’t come up with the idea of involvement themselves, somebody always approaches them."

Jim Kalbach

Peace is waged with sticky notes: Mapping Real-World Experiences

June 14, 2018

Sahibzada Mayed

"Choosing to remain silent is still a choice; agency means owning how and if you participate."

Sahibzada Mayed

The Politics of Radical Research: A Manifesto

March 27, 2023

Robin Beers

"The one ingredient that made some of the insights work was simply time."

Robin Beers Sonja Bobrowska Mujtaba Hameed Josh Morales

How to create actionable insight in the face of politics and silos [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

October 12, 2023

Aras Bilgen

"We realized designing for AI is very different from other computational mediums we used before."

Aras Bilgen

Who does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app

June 10, 2025

Malini Rao

"Managing resistance is mental; customers might resist because they've learned workarounds with legacy systems."

Malini Rao

Lessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey

June 9, 2021

Joe Meersman

"Design sprints are a rollercoaster of emotion and pressure for everybody."

Joe Meersman Pooria Sohi

Use AI to Drive Outcomes that Go Beyond the Design Sprint

September 25, 2024

Leisa Reichelt

"People can make up an opinion about anything if asked, which leads to the query effect."

Leisa Reichelt

The Five Dysfunctions of Democratized Research at Scale

March 30, 2020