Capture stuff in Microsoft One Note
I have found myself using OneNote 2007 to accomplish a good number of tasks during my workday. It has helped me eliminate a good deal of paper for single use tasks like jotting down voicemail messages or taking notes when in a meeting. Since I use it alot during the course of my day I thought I would outline some of my process here.
Note: I loosely follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done, for those of you who have seen that methodology some of this will look familiar.
When I get to my desk in the morning, after getting some coffee and getting into email and a browser OneNote 2007 is next on my list.
OneNote contains several notebooks. One for current items, like voicemail and notes, one for Work related reference, Personal reference and Writing assignments. Separating these items amongst several notebooks helps keep my work area current with the items in front of me, but also allows the storage of other items to be looked at later.
The GTD portion of OneNote for me is the Reference notebooks, One Note allows me to move any text or page to another notebook where it can live forever (or until the drive holding the notebook fills up). Because I can search across all notebooks, I usually have no trouble location items filed for reference. I also keep current copies of the company directory or other documents I might need to reference stored in One Note. Doing so, if I search for 144 One Note will find all instances of 144 in any notebook that is open. This allows me, in this example to look up a phone extension (or the name of a co-worker) and find the person or extension to call.
A sample of my current info notebook is shown below.
Voicemail in OneNote
The portion of the image outlined in red shows that my notebooks are currently not in sync. This is because the notebook files are stored on a flash drive to allow them to be used on multiple PCs. One Note syncs between the actual files and temp files for the notebooks stored in this fashion, allowing work to continue even when the stored files may be unavailable.
Because it behaves more like a paper notebook than the usual PC file/folder structure there is no need to worry about saving things you record. Like a paper tablet the saving happens automatically.
Aside from quick and easy note taking, if you are able to use a pen tablet (or even better a tablet PC) One Note supports ink entry. This will allow sketches or drawings to be included in typed notes. If a microphone or web camera are available, video and audio notes can also be stored.
The last feature that I use regularly is the office based integration between Outlook and One Note. This helps keep email messages I need for reference off of the mail server and allows me to clean up email messages as soon as they are processed.
When One Note is installed with Outlook, an add-in is configured that will allow messages selected in Outlook to be sent to One Note for safe keeping. Copies of attachments can be stored with the messages as well.
My goal was not to review One Note as a whole and go through all of the bells and whistles that the application has to offer, of which there are many, but to provide a brief look at how I use One Note to manage my day to day work. I am beginning to think I would be quite lost without it.
