Rosenverse
The Best of Both Worlds: How to Integrate Paper and Digital Notes (1st of 3 seminars)

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
Laura Schaefer
DesignOps: A Conduit for Inclusion
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Kurdin Bazaz
Culture, DIBS & Recruiting
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Chui Chui Tan
Global insights: Embracing international and intercultural research for innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Christian Crumlish
Morning Insights Panel
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Ian Swinson
Designing and Driving UX Careers
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Rebecca Gimenez
Work in Progress: Service Design at Airbnb
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Elizabeth Sklar
Co-creating research enablement with your tech org: a case study
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Jim Kalbach
Peace is waged with sticky notes: Mapping Real-World Experiences
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Carla Casariego
DesignOps in Wonderland
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Jilanna Wilson
Distributed DesignOps Management
2019 • DesignOps Community
Sam Proulx
To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Christian Crumlish
From tools to staff: What the next generation of agents means for the future of design
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Joerg Beringer
Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Llewyn Paine
[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Megan Clegg
Space for Everyone: Reframing Accessibility Through a Wider Lens
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sean Baker
Weaving Knowledge Management into the Fabric of Our Design Practice
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold

More Videos

Asia Hoe

"I learned to be relentless about prioritization and to hone in on specific details and use cases."

Asia Hoe

Partnering with Product: A Journey from Junior to Senior Design

November 29, 2023

Jorge Arango

"Linear notes are fixed hierarchically and chronologically, making it hard to find patterns across ideas."

Jorge Arango

Exploding the Notebook: How to Unlock the Power of Linked Notes (2nd of 3 seminars)

April 19, 2024

Uday Gajendar

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Uday Gajendar Robin Beers

Making the Invisible Visible: The most critical deliverable isn't always the design

July 22, 2026

Sarah Sgarlato Pierini

"The research librarian equals consistent taxonomy; without that, you can’t build accessible and searchable knowledge."

Sarah Sgarlato Pierini Kevin Newton

From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn

September 9, 2022

Gina Mendolia

"Mirroring content by repeating back what people say helps them understand their own ideas better."

Gina Mendolia

Therapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems

December 3, 2024

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Most designers feel they understand and care, but many aren’t doing much yet—there’s a disconnect between head, heart, and hands."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Inclusive Design is DesignOps

September 29, 2021

Iulia Cornigeanu

"The cultural context can dramatically change how long data remains relevant or when it expires."

Iulia Cornigeanu

QuantQual Book Club: Small Data

March 8, 2024

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

"We were a pawn. And a pawn can still win the game."

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

What Is My Value? Two Takes and Some Mistakes

January 8, 2024

Jon Fukuda

"Who needs a designer when we have generative AI?"

Jon Fukuda

Theme One Intro

October 2, 2023