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
Rittika Basu
Age and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools
2023 • Advancing Research Community
JD Buckley
COMMUNICATE: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Barb Spanton
Doing Work That Matters: A Look Beyond The Idealistic Notion of 'Doing Meaningful Work'
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Day 1 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 2: Evals are your moat
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Uday Gajendar
10 Years of Enterprise UX: Reflecting on the community and the practice
2025 • Enterprise Community
Jeff Sussna
What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Kim Holt
A Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Sharon Banh
Reimagining research: What does the field need to grow? [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Uday Gajendar
The Rise of Meta-Design: A Starter Playbook
2022 • Enterprise Community
Alicia Mooty
Design Staffing Models
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Cartography for Design Communities
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Melissa Schmidt
How UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Nicole Umphress
Delivering Design Education During a Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
Mobile Accessibility and You
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold

More Videos

Robin Beers

"You need to build relationships and understand who needs to be convinced and what convinces them."

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

Max Gadney

"Go beyond climate, look at the personal systems you understand or want to solve to find your career motivation."

Max Gadney Andrea Petrucci Joshua Stehr Hannah Wickes

Assessing UX jobs for impact in climate

August 14, 2024

Holly Cole

"Diary studies are fantastic when you're looking at growing a team and onboarding new people."

Holly Cole

Understanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work

November 8, 2018

Zariah Cameron

"Jobs are always asking me for three references; I might start asking for three happy employees."

Zariah Cameron

ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace

September 23, 2024

Bria Alexander

"Being a positive deviant means confronting challenges with limited resources but innovative, community-based approaches."

Bria Alexander Ariel Kennan Charlotte Lee Sarah Brooks Emily Lessard Gordon Ross Joanne Dong

Reflect and Chart Forward

December 10, 2021

Dan Willis

"It’s never too late to apologize. And don’t be afraid to say, I’m sorry."

Dan Willis

Enterprise Storytelling Sessions

June 3, 2019

Sam Proulx

"The four Cs—consistency, convenience, confidence, and customizability—are not just good for accessibility, they make a great experience for everyone."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

October 3, 2023

Mitchell Bernstein

"Discomfort and growth cannot coexist. You have to embrace discomfort to push innovation forward."

Mitchell Bernstein

Organizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape

September 29, 2021

Kit Unger

"Subpar experiences make it out into the world due to these pressures."

Kit Unger

Theme 2: Introduction

June 10, 2021