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
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Kara Kane
Communities of Practice for Civic Design
2022 • Civic Design Community
Andy Barraclough
From Costly Complexity to Efficient Insights: Why UX Teams Are Switching To Voxpopme
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Robin Beers
How to create actionable insight in the face of politics and silos [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Amber Knabl
Empowering innovation: The critical role of inclusive product development in the AI era
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Deanna Washington
Connecting the Ops: Plenary Panel and Closing Circle
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Briana Thomas
When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Nicole Umphress
Delivering Design Education During a Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Alexis Lucio
Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Bruce Gillespie
Learning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Jackie Velasquez-Ross
Talent Acquisition and Our Responsibility
2020 • DesignOps Community
Tiffany Cheng
Designing in a Pandemic: Integrating Speed and Rigor
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Rachel Posman
"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Michael Weir
Mixed Methods and Behavioural Science
2023 • Rosenfeld Community
Erika Flowers
Introduction to MURAL for UX
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold

More Videos

Dave Hora

"Research evangelization is the highest rated in usefulness among researchers with over 12 years’ experience."

Dave Hora

A Research Skills Evolution

March 10, 2021

Katie Hansen

"Experimental research bridges the gap between curiosity and action by turning ideas into evidence and evidence into impact."

Katie Hansen

Experimental research: techniques for deep, psychology-driven insights

March 12, 2025

Alexia Cohen

"We decided with the COP to view our budget as a moral document."

Alexia Cohen Adriane Ackerman

Increasing Health Equity and Improving the Service Experience for Under-Served Latine Communities in Arizona

December 4, 2024

Laura Klein

"When things start to go bad, we’re going to pull the plug on it immediately—that helps build trust."

Laura Klein

Unique challenges of innovation in enterprises

April 23, 2020

Emily Lessard

"Long-term contracts and retainer arrangements save time by avoiding constant rebidding."

Emily Lessard

RFPs Without Tears: Writing Inclusive RFPS that Don't Scare Away Talent

December 9, 2021

Zariah Cameron

"It’s not just about the customer experience but also the employee experience, and they must coincide."

Zariah Cameron

Streamlining an Inclusive Design Practice

October 3, 2023

Bria Alexander

"Our behavior is implicit messaging; we need both explicit and implicit signals to support resilience on teams."

Bria Alexander Laura Gatewood Corey Long Daniel Orbach Laine Prokay Deanna Smith

The Big Question about Resilience: A panel discussion

September 23, 2024

Sam Proulx

"I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a computer in the house talking at me."

Sam Proulx

To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility

June 10, 2022

Sam Proulx

"Mobile is the first major platform where accessibility features are built in and mature."

Sam Proulx

Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World

September 8, 2022