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
"Empathy is one of those catchall terms that ends up making it very hard to create action because you don’t know what anyone actually needs."
Jemma Ahmed Jon Fukuda Abby Covert Stefanie Hutka Louis RosenfeldTake Back those Words! Reclaiming and Reenergizing the Vocabulary of UX
August 21, 2026
"We’re in this initial stage of tinkering, just trying to make the tech behave the way we expect it to."
Sheryl Cababa Ethan Marcotte Milena PribicDay 2 Panel
June 5, 2024
"Sharing power and allowing researchers to choose projects creates less traumatic and more equitable workplaces."
Matt Bernius Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Aditi Joshi Alba VillamilLearnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process
March 10, 2022
"Adoption doesn’t happen overnight; it’s all about patience and incremental wins."
Nicole Wright Ned DwyerDemocratizing Research at HoneyBook
March 9, 2022
"I was no longer a point person in recruiting or shaping the team, but that was okay."
Edward CuppsThe Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor
June 11, 2021
"If you extinguish 365 fires in a year, bravo, but what do you really have to show for it, and what’s next?"
Dominique WardThe Most Exciting Time for DesignOps is Now
September 8, 2022
"Designers should act like therapists or journalists when negotiating political divides around data governance."
David ConradThe Feeling of Data
September 14, 2023
"What would it look like if we could ask, how do I make this the absolute best environment for complex problem solving, instead of how do I take away all the annoying hard problems?"
John CutlerThe Alignment Trap
November 29, 2023
"FEMA is not going to stand up a UX department; it’s our responsibility to witness and find ways to help."
Emily Danielson“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
June 9, 2022
