Sunday, April 16, 2006

Dump your stress with OneNote

Nice tip from Darren Strange (Office Rocker! Strange thinking about Office):

open a OneNote page
force yourself to sit there for 15 minutes while you dump everything in your mental todo list onto the page
keep going
don't stop and don't worry about duplicates
don't let yourself get distracted into doing some of them
5 minutes to go
OK finished? well done - everything is on the page, you can exhale now
Drag text around and start grouping them on the page
tip: hold down the Alt key as you drag and drop to join sections up on the page
Now your worry list is organised into groups
turn each line into an action if appropriate, flag it for follow up (I just click the button for today every time)
switch to Outlook (all your tasks will be synched there) and in the to-do bar make sure you've not got any duplicates
set the correct follow up time (today, tomorrow, next week etc) for each one
switch to calendar week view and drag items off the to-do bar onto the calendar to block out sufficient time to do each task
now you can relax knowing its all in hand and you can go off and have a nice weekend/evening
Try it - I bet you will be less stressed out if you do..

Another top tip - in a meeting, click the "notes about this item" from calendar and add all your notes and flag actions as you go along. At the end of a meeting where you've whiteboarded some stuff, take a photo with your smartphone and later paste it onto the page. You can share it with others easily too either via email or shared notebooks. And with OneNote mobile this will get even easier.

Happy Easter everyone!

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous2:32 PM

    I use OneNote 100% for my notes now. Amanda has been using it for a few years and got me into using it about a year ago. It's awesome for organizing notes.

    I've been testing 2007 for a couple of months now and I am pretty impressed with it, especially with the syncronization.

    Cheers,

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