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
Alfred Kahn
A Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Steve Portigal
War Stories LIVE! Steve Portigal
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Etienne Fang
The Power of Care: From Human-Centered Research to Humanity-Centered Leadership
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Alissa Briggs
How to Coach Enterprise Experimentation
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Marieke McCloskey
User Science: Product Analytics & User Research
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Mac Smith
Measuring Up: Using Product Research for Organizational Impact
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Alison Rand
Scaling Impact with Service Design
2021 • DesignOps Community
Aurobinda Pradhan
Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Ned Dwyer
The Future of DesignOps is Tool Consolidation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Sean Baker
Weaving Knowledge Management into the Fabric of Our Design Practice
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Tatyana Mamut
Opening Keynote: Breaking Conway's Law--or How to Work Differently and Not Ship Your Org Chart
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
David Sternberg
Uncovering the hidden forces shaping user behavior
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Lija Hogan
Practical Principles of Inclusive Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Corey Long
Hiring in DesignOps: A Critical Study on How to Hire and Get Hired
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Hands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people
2025 • Rosenfeld Community

More Videos

Sam Proulx

"Confidence is a higher burden in retail because people are giving real money; inaccessible flows cause quick abandonment."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

June 7, 2023

Bruce Gillespie

"Choose plain, everyday words over jargon to meet your audience where they are."

Bruce Gillespie

Learning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling

March 13, 2025

Jemma Ahmed

"The term ‘study’ rings of academia and reinforces power dynamics; I prefer continuous engagement instead."

Jemma Ahmed Robert Fabricant Sean McKay Llewyn Paine Kate Towsey Noah Bond

Theme Panel

March 11, 2025

Wyatt Hayman

"We ended up piloting a group in Tokyo for non-English speakers, which was key to testing the language challenge."

Wyatt Hayman

Global Research Panels

August 8, 2020

Taylor Jennings

"Having a place for people to self-serve insights is really big, so they don’t ask us to repeat research."

Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex Knoll

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

March 9, 2022

Aditi Ruiz

"We have to ask how confident we are in our empathy—whether it’s evidence-based or just assumptions."

Aditi Ruiz Christian Crumlish Farid Sabitov

Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2

December 6, 2022

Nidhi Singh Rathore

"Too often research is something we do to people, but participatory research invites participants as co-creators of knowledge."

Nidhi Singh Rathore Amber Davis

Embracing participation to unlock deeper truths in commercial research

March 12, 2025

Luke Roberts

"Expanding empathy beyond humans to other intelligences like nature is a promising direction for design."

Luke Roberts Christian Bason, Ph.D. Amanda Woolley Ben Reason

Panel Discussion

December 4, 2024

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

"Some situations are not worth saving. If you have no champion, no clarity, and no purpose, is it worth it to continue?"

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

What Is My Value? Two Takes and Some Mistakes

January 8, 2024