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
"If you’re standing for something, you have to stand for the thing, even if it’s a hard fight."
Frances YllanaDesignOps–Leading the Path to Parity
April 27, 2023
"We formed a core task force empowered to make decisions quickly, avoiding weeks of delay waiting for formal approvals."
Davis Neable Guy SegalHow to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
June 10, 2021
"Successful companies are organized around what made them successful, and their past success is often their worst impediment to change. – John Pittman, Autodesk."
Nathan ShedroffDouble Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
March 31, 2020
"I’ve worked with international counterparts through 30 calls with designers around the world."
Kara KaneTheme One Intro
November 16, 2022
"Freedom dreaming is dreaming about a system that is free from today's oppression."
Sheryl CababaLiving in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
June 6, 2023
"Google Design Sprint is the best inception strategy I know for design thinking."
Maria SkaadenContinuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
November 8, 2018
"Fear is in the air as AI seems to be coming for our jobs, but fear doesn’t suit us—we are too optimistic, too creative, and too valuable."
Brendan JarvisIt was the Best of Times. It was the Worst of Times.
September 25, 2024
"We were using 10 different tools to do bite-size pieces of the research flow internally."
Ned Dwyer Jadyn AguilarThe Future of DesignOps is Tool Consolidation
September 23, 2024
"We want the Rosenfeld community, both in person and virtual, to feel as loving, supportive, and informative as possible."
Louis Rosenfeld Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 2, 2023
