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
"Thank you to all our sponsors; this entire conference would not be possible without you."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
September 29, 2021
"If you find that place with a supportive team, then go and get it. Never go into civic design alone."
Charlotte Vorbeck Shahzma Esmail Edward Alton Sarah McArthur Ariel KennanPipeline to Civic Design
December 9, 2021
"AI can help tailor upward communications, but you still need to consider the idiosyncrasies of your audience."
Catt SmallHow the most senior designers are using AI in their work right now
July 1, 2026
"Ethics must live in the practitioner; companies are not people and cannot embody ethics without individuals choosing to do so."
Mariah HayEthics in Tech Education: Designing to Provide Opportunity for All
June 14, 2018
"Unless your products yield exceptional emotional value, they’re not going to succeed."
Kelly GotoEmotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
May 13, 2015
"My talk is about being misunderstood and navigating an identity crisis."
Lin NieWhen Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
March 10, 2021
"People work longer hours because of the fear of saying no and fearing job loss, not because it's sustainable."
Alla WeinbergWorkers Are Sick of Change: The Cure is Psychological Safety
June 6, 2023
"Inclusive design is about one size fits one, not one size fits all, especially in research methodologies."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
September 29, 2021
"In science, it’s better to miss a phenomenon than to misidentify one that doesn’t really exist."
Victor Lombardi Ted Booth HK Dunston Andrew OtwellBridging Design and Climate Science
February 14, 2024
