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
Gina Mendolia
Coordinated collaboration: a Service Design & DesignOps love story
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
John Maeda
Making Sense of Enterprise UX
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Peter Merholz
The Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path
2022 • DesignOps Community
Brad Orego
Bringing Customer Research to More Internal Teams
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Patrick Boehler
The service shift: transforming media organizations to create real value through design
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Jim Kalbach
Peace is waged with sticky notes: Mapping Real-World Experiences
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Melissa Tsang
From Insights to Action: Driving Business Values through DesignOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Jennifer Strickland
Adopting a "Design By" Method
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Steve Portigal
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Carol Smith
Operationalizing Responsible, Human-Centered AI
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Ellen Chisa
The Values of Design
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Yunyan Li
UX Best Practices
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Wendy Johansson
Be a Product Boss!
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Dalia El-Shimy
So You've Got a Seat at the Table. Now What?
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Weidan Li
Qualitative synthesis with ChatGPT: Better or worse than human intelligence?
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Do you want to work on climate? (Climate UX Discussion Series)
2023 • Climate UX Interest Group

More Videos

Maria Giudice

"Before you accept a mission as a changemaker, ask yourself do you have a clear directive, champion support, and the right resources?"

Maria Giudice

Becoming a Changemaker by Leading with Design

March 29, 2023

Dem Gerolemou

"No one wants to use a calendar; they want to be organized. Protect users from having to engage with complexity."

Dem Gerolemou Alexis Oh Neef Rehman

Climate technology fundamentals

May 15, 2024

Sam Proulx

"Screen readers let us jump from one heading to another, replicating the experience of skimming a page visually."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

December 9, 2021

Joerg Beringer

"Most product teams don't really have user research outputs or they come too late and disconnected from design."

Joerg Beringer Thomas Geis

Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes

June 10, 2025

Jackie Ho

"It took a long time for teams to prepare their first growth board presentations because many weren’t used to roadmapping or metrics."

Jackie Ho

Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards

January 8, 2024

Jennifer Kong

"The edit rate, our metric of human-added characters over total characters, tracks AI output quality without burdening users."

Jennifer Kong

Journeying toward AI-assisted documentation in healthcare

June 5, 2024

Corey Long

"Always communicate next steps, timelines, and delays honestly with candidates; they will appreciate it and stay engaged."

Corey Long

Hiring in DesignOps: A Critical Study on How to Hire and Get Hired

September 23, 2024

Lija Hogan

"Researchers have a lane enforcing best practice, but non-researchers can significantly contribute to creating intelligence."

Lija Hogan

Doing more with more: Lessons from the Front Lines of Democratization

March 9, 2022

Catherine Courage

"Saying no with purpose and rationale helped us scale from nine people to over 150 without burning out the team."

Catherine Courage

The Enterprise UX Journey: Lessons From the Voyage & The Opportunity Ahead

May 13, 2015