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
"The biggest learning is it’s about understanding the people and organization beyond just the design team."
Nora Tejeda Giovanna AlonsoScaling Design Capabilities at BBVA Through a Self-service Design Model
June 10, 2021
"The system always kicks back—the consequences of our actions unfold over time."
Peter MorvilleThe Architecture of Understanding
May 13, 2015
"More than a third of content on social media sites is AI generated, creating a training problem for new AI models."
Llewyn PaineCoexisting with AI: A practical guide for researchers to navigate tools, ethics, and integration
March 11, 2025
"Offering the ability to save your progress allows users with disabilities to complete tasks on their own time."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
March 28, 2023
"We are in the process of growing and maturing the design system before we open it to the public."
Bob Baxley Sara Asche Anderson Sharon Bautista Frank Duran Jamie Kaspszak Abbey Smalley Sylas SouzaTheme 4: Discussion
January 8, 2024
"Eleanor Ostrom showed that communities can often manage commons better than governments or organizations."
Amy ThibodeauOpening Keynote: Process and Ambiguity
October 23, 2019
"The insights to action ratio tracks how many insights are acted upon, providing measurable impact."
Jen Cardello Dr. Shadi Janansefat Alex WrightCurating insight: Strategies for integrating knowledge across research functions
March 11, 2025
"Agentic systems don’t just respond; they decide which tools to use, analyze results, think between tool calls, and can do multiple things simultaneously."
Luke WroblewskiDesigning AI Applications
March 5, 2026
"If you request the mobile website on desktop it usually works better than requesting the desktop website on mobile."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
November 17, 2022