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
Dane DeSutter
Keeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Steve Portigal
Looking Back…to Look Ahead
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Bria Alexander
Theme Two Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Amy Jiménez Márquez
The Atypical UX Manager Path
2020 • Enterprise Community
Prerna Makanawala
Achieving Balanced Design Consistency
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Victor Udoewa
Radical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Tristin Oldani
Turning awareness into action with Climate UX
2025 • Climate UX Interest Group
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Alnie Figueroa
The Future of Design Operations: Transforming Our Craft
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Nathan Shedroff
Redefining Value: Bridging the Innovation Culture Divide
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Stephen Pollard
Closing Keynote: Getting giants to dance - what can we learn from designing large and complex public infrastructure?
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Flow and Superfluidity for Design Orgs
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
PJ Buddhari
Meet Spectrum, Adobe’s Design System
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Taiye Akin-Akinyosoye
Amplifying voices and enhancing user research through group interviews
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Melissa Eggleston
Practical People Skills for Building Trust on Teams and with Partners
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Chloe Amos-Edkins

"Digital connectivity is necessary for participation in society, but half the world lacks internet access."

Chloe Amos-Edkins

A Cultural Approach: Research in the Context of Glocalisation

March 27, 2023

Lija Hogan

"Many companies start with vision accessibility because of legal risks, but accessibility should be broader."

Lija Hogan

Practical Principles of Inclusive Research

March 27, 2023

Marieke McCloskey

"I think we as UX researchers are uniquely positioned to forge bonds with data teams because of our storytelling and cross-functional work."

Marieke McCloskey

User Science: Product Analytics & User Research

March 11, 2021

Kaitlin Tasker

"Highly trained professionals still default to a presumed 'standard' under pressure, revealing how bias persists."

Kaitlin Tasker

Fast and Fearless Inclusive Research

March 27, 2023

Clara Kliman-Silver

"Trust is paramount; designers want transparency about what the AI is trained on and what data it uses."

Clara Kliman-Silver

UX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design

June 7, 2023

Joshua Graves

"Anger doesn’t mean you have to yell—it’s about speaking clearly to the problem you see."

Joshua Graves

We Need To Talk: Navigating Conversations with Your Boss (Part 1 of 3)

April 14, 2025

Taylor Jennings

"Drag and drop ease, and collaborative affinity diagramming in the tool, were unexpected but very welcome advantages."

Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex Knoll

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

March 9, 2022

Jen Briselli

"Think about alignment versus coherence. Coherence means the system makes sense even if parts go different directions."

Jen Briselli

Learning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict

April 16, 2025

Sara Asche Anderson

"Being human is the foundation—seeing the person on the other side of the conversation as a human being."

Sara Asche Anderson Jamie Kaspszak

Not Your Ordinary Re-Brand: Design's Path to Driving Customer Obsession at Best Buy

January 8, 2024