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
"Proofs of possibility, not just experiments, are essential to demonstrate viable pathways for systemic transformation."
Jayne Engle Tanya Chung-Tiam-FookCivic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics
August 25, 2022
"We have over a thousand participants from 61 countries, but remember this is only a sliver of the broader service design community."
Marc FonteijnFirst Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report
December 4, 2024
"The pandemic is a message from the universe to pause and rethink who we hire and how we train."
Steve Portigal Alba Villamil Sam LadnerThe Future of Research: Bridging the Gaps
July 29, 2021
"It's not about going out to communities but changing your team and leadership to genuinely reflect those communities."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"Excel is great, but it’s not scalable when managing design operations at scale."
Farid SabitovTheme Four Intro
September 9, 2022
"Government culture is not like tech culture; IT constraints mean tools like Sketch are still a win."
Elena Naids Liza McRuerThe Power of Difficult Conversations: A Case Study on How We Introduced Design Ops in the Federal Government Space
October 2, 2023
"Fletcher Prevend took us to the next level by reporting design and user research directly into the CIO office—a huge differentiator."
Kristin WisnewskiMeasuring What Matters
October 23, 2019
"Kate Dixon proactively checked on me during COVID and even started a daily movement challenge to keep us connected and healthy."
Caitlyn Hampton Monica Lee Jina YoonCompass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World
June 11, 2021
"After years of fighting to be included in strategic boardroom decision making, many UX professionals are now finding themselves seated at the grown-up table."
JD BuckleyCommunicating the ROI of UX within a large enterprise and out on the streets
June 14, 2018
