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
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
"The Rosenverse is a weird mix: it’s a for-profit business but also a neutral community resource."
Louis RosenfeldThe Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld
June 5, 2024
"A design program manager is like air traffic control making sure all the planes land in the right place."
Brennan HartichCommunicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
November 7, 2018
"A single line of UI text might be a small ask but can have massive impact on customer understanding and experience."
Craig Brookes Andreas Huebner Morgan Quinn"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood
June 11, 2021
"No tracking is perfect because numbers tell you what likely happened, but not why it happened."
Erin WeigelUX Lessons from running more than 1,200 A/B Tests
July 10, 2024
"I recently observed a director of engineering talking to a content strategist about what they were both seeing because they were both in the actual physical room at the same time."
Vicky Teinaki Michele Marut Tim ParmeeShort Take #3: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"Without equity, you can only have design theater because it’s not really design if it’s not including everybody."
Charlotte Vorbeck Shahzma Esmail Edward Alton Sarah McArthur Ariel KennanPipeline to Civic Design
December 9, 2021
"You don’t want to miss out on the sponsor sessions — they’re free and high quality, not sales pitches."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
November 18, 2022
"Building influence has been such a challenging part of growing in my own career. It takes a lot of communication and understanding others’ goals."
Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica HarlleeWhat's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
February 22, 2024
"I never record interviews with staff, never. Recording invites sugarcoating or lying because people are already vulnerable."
Steve Baty Richard Dalton Maria Giudice Harry MaxDiscussion
June 9, 2016
