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
"With great customizability comes great complication."
Sam ProulxUnderstanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
October 2, 2023
"I thought I had this whole being a designer thing figured out until I touched 2,000 images and saw giant black bars across all my buttons."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
June 8, 2016
"When we started the word Enterprise was important because UX was mostly in startups and enterprise was considered unsexy."
Wendy Johansson Surya VankaDesign at Scale: Behind the Scenes
April 29, 2021
"Designing and researching wisdom is a dialogue, not a monologue."
Cassini Nazir Meah LinThe Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
March 27, 2023
"UX really doesn’t have a seat at the table yet and that has some implications for us."
Rich MironovHow Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
December 6, 2022
"As a designer and leader in this space, I've had to learn a lot about policy so I can come in and have really deep discussions with policy folks as a peer."
Toby HaugDiscussion
June 9, 2017
"What if it’s all a hoax and we just invented a better world for no reason? That’s a good place to be."
Louis Rosenfeld Matt Jones Olga Khroustaleva Michael Leggett Karol MunozDo you want to work on climate? (Climate UX Discussion Series)
November 15, 2023
"Facilitation is part setting the stage and part performing on it."
Shelby SwitzerMaking Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
December 10, 2021
"The pressure to produce insights quickly defines many organizations shaped by 'move fast and break things' culture."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSWThe power to heal and harm
March 13, 2025
