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 are altering any form of self-expression, you need to be really careful."
Cheryl PlatzDemystifying Multimodal Design: The Design Practice You Didn't Know You're Doing
April 4, 2024
"Knowledge can be dangerous and misused, but democratizing access helps self-regulate by enabling fact checking."
Matt DuignanHITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge
July 16, 2019
"Websites and digital spaces should be government, not just provide information about government."
Irina Tikhonova Kari DietrichSmall Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement
December 9, 2021
"The hardest part of any researcher's job is translating insights into action."
Jane DavisStrategic Shifts and Innovations in User Research: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
March 11, 2025
"Design ops work is not new; it's been happening in design organizations, software companies, banks across industries and around the world for many years."
Kristin SkinnerTheme 1 Intro
September 29, 2021
"Discovery workshops are seen as time-consuming and costly, causing resistance from internal stakeholders."
Michele WongHelping Them Help Us
January 8, 2024
"We think holistically about the impact of introducing or removing tools across the org."
Ned Dwyer Jadyn AguilarThe Future of DesignOps is Tool Consolidation
September 23, 2024
"Market research is a hundred-year-old multidisciplinary field with many qualitative and quantitative methods supporting business decisions."
Nicole Aleong Michaela Mora Prayag Narula Brianna SylverWhat UX research can learn from other research practices [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
September 14, 2023
"Mastery is achievable, whether you have 10,000 hours or not—it’s about building that portfolio and case studies."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
