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
Sarah Williams
A Framework for CX Transformation
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sarah Brooks
Theme Three Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Marisa Bernstein
It Takes GRIT: Lessons from the Small, but Mighty World of Civic Usability Testing
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Indi Young
Paying Better Attention to the Problem with Indi Young
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Briana Thomas
The Quiet Force: Uncovering Hidden Leadership in High-Impact Design Teams
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Adam Cutler
Discussion
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Wendy Johansson
Design at Scale: Behind the Scenes
2021 • Enterprise Community
Abbey Smalley
Scaling UX Past the Size of Your Team
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Mariah Hay
Ethics in Tech Education: Designing to Provide Opportunity for All
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Maggie Dieringer
Creating Consistency Through Constant Change
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Farid Sabitov
Theme Four Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Catherine Dubut
Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design
2021 • Enterprise Community
Aaron Stienstra
Leveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Nidhi Singh Rathore
Embracing participation to unlock deeper truths in commercial research
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sarah Auslander
Incremental Steps to Drive Radical Innovation in Policy Design
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold

More Videos

Rusha Sopariwala

"Show and tells are not critiques, they’re chances to share progress and practice presentation without pressure."

Rusha Sopariwala

Remote, Together: Craft and Collaboration Across Disciplines, Borders, Time Zones, and a Design Org of 170+

June 9, 2022

Jose Coronado

"Results don’t speak for themselves. We have to speak for what we do or others will frame it for us."

Jose Coronado

From Zero to Hero

September 8, 2022

Tricia Wang

"You need to build credibility. It's not enough to just state a problem, you have to show you'll do the work and push for it."

Tricia Wang

SCALE: Discussion

June 15, 2018

Susan Weinschenk

"Experimentation and agile approaches are key—try something, see how it works, then try something else if it doesn’t move the bar."

Susan Weinschenk

Evaluating the Maturity of UX in Your Organization

January 15, 2020

Alexandra Schmidt

"Designers need better training to work with off-the-shelf enterprise software like Sitecore, Salesforce, and SharePoint."

Alexandra Schmidt

Enterprise UX Playbook

December 1, 2022

Kate Koch

"You should take risks, and if you fail, you need to fail fast and pivot immediately."

Kate Koch Prateek Kalli

Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX

September 30, 2021

Alberto Ferreira

"Combining behavioral and attitudinal data helps us understand not just what users do, but how they feel about it."

Alberto Ferreira

Making it Count: Developing a custom digital metric framework that works

October 15, 2021

Ben Davies

"To maintain tagging and freshness, you need content PMs with expertise, supported by robust content management processes."

Ben Davies Matt Duignan Andrew Michael Dr. Emily DiLeo

Expert Panel: The Principles of Research Repository Design

March 11, 2022

Ron Bronson

"That friends is service experience in the 21st century."

Ron Bronson

Design, Consequences & Everyday Life

November 18, 2022