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
Jon Fukuda
Design Planning and Management Support
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Joshua Graves
We Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dave Hora
A Research Skills Evolution
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Lin Nie
When Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Landon Barnes
Are My Research Findings Actually Meaningful?
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Nalini P. Kotamraju
An Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Steve Portigal
War Stories LIVE! Steve Portigal
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Jodi Forlizzi
Design and AI innovation
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Sarah Brooks
Fireside chat with Sarah Brooks and Jen Pahlka
2021 • Civic Design Community
Sofia Quintero
The Product Philosophy Behind EnjoyHQ
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Dan Hill
Strategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life
2022 • Enterprise Community
Séamus Byrne
Aligning Teams with Choreography
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Brennan Hartich
Communicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Matt Stone
Scaling Empathy, A Case Study in Change Management
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Russ Unger
Getting Out from Under Everyone: How to Escape the Paralysis of Getting Started
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold

More Videos

Kristin Skinner

"62% of people said literally we don't know how to measure the value of design ops yet."

Kristin Skinner Kamdyn Moore

Group Activity: A Deep Dive Into Value and Outcomes

October 23, 2019

Sahibzada Mayed

"Care is a relational practice, a form of reciprocity, and a way of being in community and kinship."

Sahibzada Mayed Lauren Lin

Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration

October 4, 2023

Jorge Arango

"Language itself can be a powerful design object, shaping social roles and organizational interactions."

Jorge Arango

Design as an Antidote to VUCA

May 9, 2019

Dave Hoffer

"AI isn’t about being an expert for most roles yet, but being AI conversant and experimental is crucial."

Dave Hoffer Joanne Weaver

UX Job Search AMA #3 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer

July 16, 2025

Benjamin Real

"Losing design ops led to missed deadlines, bad experiences for customers, and overstretched design leaders."

Benjamin Real

Showing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team

October 21, 2020

Courtney Maya George

"Having visible work through Jira or spreadsheets helps designers set boundaries and ask for support objectively."

Courtney Maya George

Scale Your Organization and Grow Your Designers

September 8, 2022

Brad Peters

"Even when we bring the data together, we’re still not necessarily synthesizing very well."

Brad Peters Anne Mamaghani

Short Take #1: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers

December 6, 2022

Peter Merholz

"Elevation of design leadership to no more than two levels below the CEO signals that design is important company-wide."

Peter Merholz

Design at Scale is People!

June 11, 2021

Sam Ladner

"If you’re a Theory X manager, you believe work is something people hate and must be controlled."

Sam Ladner

Data Exhaust and Personal Data: Learning from Consumer Products to Enhance Enterprise UX

June 8, 2016