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
"Learning is fractal—self-similar at different scales from individuals to organizations."
Jen BriselliLearning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict
April 16, 2025
"Psychological safety comes from good relationships, genuine care, and leadership candor."
Michelle MorrisonPractice What You Preach
January 8, 2024
"Age carries with it obvious visible differences and lived experience, while race often involves less visible but equally impactful structures."
Megan CamposWhat Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research
March 12, 2021
"A combination of push and pull communication strategies usually works best to share insights."
Lija HoganDoing more with more: Lessons from the Front Lines of Democratization
March 9, 2022
"The linguistic shift from we have AI to we’re redesigning how we work signals maturity."
Bethany BrownRewiring operations with service design and AI
November 20, 2025
"Designers have power. We get to decide who gets heard, who gets included, who gets excluded."
Jennifer StricklandAdopting a "Design By" Method
December 9, 2021
"Instead of continuous collecting, we need intentional curation and framing of insights that fit the work at hand."
Sharon Banh Dave Hora Marieke McCloskey Alicia ZhongReimagining research: What does the field need to grow? [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
October 16, 2024
"If you’re not investing or quitting something, what is the point of having a strategy?"
Adam ThomasSurvival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
December 6, 2022
"Frames are not static; they are tools for continuous discovery, reflection, and change."
Kaitlin TaskerFast and Fearless Inclusive Research
March 27, 2023
