Doodling can help you pay attention | Hacker News Reader

Doodling can help you pay attention

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114 pointsohjeez42 comments

Finally proof! Doodling has always helped me focus. It channels distractions onto paper, leaving me free to concentrate.

If I can’t doodle in meetings it’s hard not to either fidget or fall asleep.

People have called me out on it, thinking that as I’ve been drawing I wasn’t paying attention - only to be surprised when I recite the last 5 minutes of conversation.

Here are some examples, all done in meetings, and in some cases the most productive result: https://www.instagram.com/mattkevan.art/

I've never been able to focus while doodling; I always get too sucked into the drawing and truly only focus on that, though I usually doodled faces and bodies, which maybe requires more bandwidth to do? Not sure. Either way, while I'm not surprised that doodling can aid in focus, I can totally see why people would take it to mean you aren't paying attention. Not saying you don't understand either, but its unfortunate that something beneficial to the exact goal of the meeting (transmitting knowledge) is read as exactly the opposite.

Yeah, I know. It's especially annoying as when becoming more senior, being present is no longer enough – body language, and behaviour becomes just as important.

separate from the main topic, i like your use of coalescing multiple insta posts together into one huge art :)

How long are your meetings that you can draw those?! Wow! The art is amazing.

Thanks! The bigger ones can take months - add a little bit every day.

It's really a pity your art can't be seen on that page without enabling Javascript.

Or having an Instagram account, apparently.

You can view the first few images without being logged in, but once you scroll down a few rows you get a login prompt that you can't close. Maybe OP also posts their art somewhere else?

https://www.kevan.tv/projects/doodles/

No JavaScript or logins needed here...

Thank you!

Is this doodling on an iPad or do you scan this in? Looks amazing.

iPad. The smaller ones are pen and ink, but Procreate and the Apple Pencil is such a good combination.

This is nice. I doodle but it is the visual representation of the meeting/presentation. I try to map out the key points of the meeting in visual forms. People have referenced my doodle to remember the key meeting points.

I have been doing for quite a while but I never tried to improve the doodle part. My belief was that the essence of the doodle was the key point that gets highlighted in an easy to understand way.

However, recently, a good friend (designer + engineer) introduced me to the books by Dan Roam[1] and I'm learning to improve to tell a better story visually.

1. https://www.danroam.com

Thanks for the link, those books look really interesting.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who doodles with square symmetry like that. Mine are far less detailed than these wonders, though. :)

Tacking on my anecdote, I doodled through all my classes in high school. There were a couple times I tried taking notes and my scores plummeted. It's hard to recommend though, I think the fear of not having something important written down is significant (I figured I could ask someone else if that ever happened).

I discovered the same thing in college. For me, taking notes became a distraction. It kept me from actively thinking about what I'm listening to.

If I'm trying to understand something presented verbally, I now limit my "notes" to questions I can't ask immediately and quotes I find useful.

If I ever decide that my goal is to chronicle a meeting, I do so with the understanding that I'm not going to be participating much. I also send out an email summary of my notes to everyone in the meeting so people can confirm that I interpreted things correctly. I've discovered that I often misunderstand nuanced arguments when I'm focused on chronicling. Giving people the opportunity to correct my misunderstandings helps counteract that.

These are much better versions of the exact kind of doodling I used to do in school. Small shapes drawn very close together eventually resulting in a huge mosaic. Would be fascinating to see some kind of study on the types of doodling people do and whether certain patterns lend themselves to thinking more than others.

Edit: I said it seemed to make sense, but I did a quick Google Scholar search and 1 study was negative, 1 study positive and 1 study inconclusive [1]. I couldn't find any meta studies [2]. So yea... hmm...

eh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Pretty related, I recently launched a show HN about a free doodle web app that I made [3]. It is meant for doodling with an ipad, wacom or any other pressure-sensitive stylus.

[1]

https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/handle/10214/16260

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-019-00124-9

https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/edpsych_fac_articles/164...

[2] https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=doodling+meta+study&hl=n...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21399910

Sorry for all the people suddenly feeling vindicated but the sample size is kinda small to make such a broad statement. The "sorta double blind" study only has 40 participants, 20 of whom were doodling. Plus, it wasn't random doodling, it was filling in shapes. The other cited study that I can find in TFA is (presented) a case study, aka n=1. Can't actually read it but if this is the case, it's still pretty flimsy.

So it's looking good but with the track record in academia, I wouldn't consider this "proven" until a meta-analysis happens.

IMO this is quite easy to figure out for oneself though:

doodle in class a couple of times and then use a control condition that you see fit. If you notice a clear difference while you weren't hyper vigilant about all of this, then doodling has an impact on you.

I've done exactly this but then regarding cycling to work vs. metro to work. Cycling is much better as I was able to clearly notice that I was more awake.

I used to do this a lot and people got very iterated by it. I got the feedback that it seems like I am not paying attention. I always felt the opposite was true. Seems like I should start doing it again!

Well I think may be don’t do it when other people are trying to communicate with you.

And here I was thinking it was just a method I used to compensate for dealing with meetings with ADHD. It does make it look like I'm paying less attention, but it makes a huge difference in the amount of info from the meeting I'm able to retain.

Instead of traditional doodling I do 'write only' note taking and diagramming. This is just to be able to focus. The notes are not meant to be ever consulted as they are (a) deliberately unstructured so as not to put constraints on the process and (b) a lifetime of keyboard usage has rendered my handwriting undecipherable unless I concentrate 100% on the writing which would defy the purpose.

Life long doodler here. Have had many teachers and lecturers express their consternation at me, but I persist. I often find it necessary to prevent my mind sort of "zoning out" which is unpleasant.

I always remember a particular incident, when I was 15, a history teacher got very annoyed and went through my entire exercise book where the left-hand page was filled with some (IMO) excellent robot/human hybrids, and he used a pen to deface every last one of them. I didn't enjoy that class, apart from the drawing, but I did go on to top the grade in that semester. I strongly believe it was because of the drawings, not in spite of it.

I used to fold origami in meetings, people got used to it, over time meeting rooms accumulated cats[1] and rats[2]

[1] Jose Anibal Voyer's cat https://www.scribd.com/document/357841157/Anibal-Voyer-cat-p...

[2] Eric Josiel's rat (mouse?) http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/arts/JoiselRat.pdf

As a remote worker, doodling is my number-one hack for keeping my hands off the keyboard and trackpad during a teleconference.

Interesting...I have this habit, and try to hide it so that people don't think I'm being rude. I do it a lot, especially in 1:1 situations like job interviews. The doodles are typically topical...visuals of what's being said in the room, versus innatention.

> The doodles are typically topical...visuals of what's being said in the room

Same - I'm an INSANELY visual person and I draw tons of flowcharts, tables, charts, etc. to represent notes vs. how other people go about it. I usually end up with 25-35% of my notes being visual.

It's the same as someone bouncing their leg or needing to move while learning, our brains work in different ways and I've learned to "go along for the ride" and utilize it vs. fighting it.

I have found however that in highly corporate environments it is very unwelcome. I've also had a problem with very detailed note taking (ie: writing down/typing what someone said verbatim). People can get unhappy if you can recite the entirety of a meeting back to them from 3-4 pages of your Moleskine notebook complete with diagrams of the whiteboards. For me it's about collecting a solid/defensible spec as an engineer, for them it's unwelcome managerial accountability.

(reading your comment when I got to the bit about "bouncing their leg" ooops... guilty...)

My former boss used to get really exercised by my doodling in meetings. He tried to bust me on not paying attention until I recounted in detail the meeting discussion along with several questions about subtle points that came up from various comments during the meeting.

Subsequent to that, guess who got canned, and who has since been promoted TWICE to a very senior level and still doodles (during remote online meetings).

The last is an exercise left to the reader :)

I do this a lot. I draw lines and squares and in my mind (as I do it) they are directly meaningful with respect to what we're talking about.

What about "audio" doodling as an interesting parallel?

A doodler is typically listening to their subject, whilst their visual attention is elsewhere. An audio doodler has their visual attention on the subject, but is listening elsewhere. A piano player I know will quite happy subconsciously play music on the piano, whilst reading a book placed where the sheet music would normally be.

I absolutely pay better attention when I can give my hand and the rest of my brain something mindless to do. Doodling helps me listen and retain a lot more than if I'm forced to just stare at the subject - in that case I get fidgety and distracted.

Almost 30% better retention, but on participants names? That’s a weird thing to remember. Is that just the thing they cherry picked that the participants happened to remember better?

Ted talk about the topic. https://www.ted.com/talks/sunni_brown/transcript

I did this as an experiment on myself in high school during listening comprehension tests and found I’m remember details much better while doodling. I still do it, intermixed with other kinds of notes.

If you think this is a new idea, see Gary Cooper's courtroom speech at the end of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), where he defends doodling and other nervous habits.

My personal experiences says the opposite. But maybe that's because I have an ugly subconscious. My doodles can be very dark/intense.

I did this during jury duty, it’s the only way I was able to take in all the information.

I do contour drawings in meetings to keep from falling asleep

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