Fresh Focus On Productivity!™

Welcome back!

Although I’ve mentioned before my love affair with Microsoft OneNote, it is worth doing another article, with a bit more explanation on how they can really help you organize for productivity and organization.

Please click on the pictures for an explanation of the different areas on OneNote.

Firstly, you will create a top level category, which is called a “Notebook” (clever, eh?). Notebooks can have pages, but you can break this down into a hierarchy that is more efficient.

Notebook can have children (don’t ask me about the birds & the bees of Notebook, because you really don’t want me to go there!). These children are called “Sections”. Each Section can have pages as well. You can also create Section Groups, which will hold multiple Sections (like the spiral bound notebooks that have the dividers that are folders). Sections and Section Groups can have pages, too, so if you want to provide an outline of a Section or Section Group, you can use that page to do so. Or if you want to post un-filed tidbits of information there, it’s great for that too.

Each different category in OneNote can be colorized to whatever color you desire, and each page can have it’s own templates. Included in the base install are Academic, Blank, Business, Decorative and Planner templates. There are well over 100 installed templates, with many more available at MS Office online. I choose decorative templates, because I’m an eye candy whore and love to look at aesthetically pleasing things. Different templates can be chosen for each different page, so you’ll never get bored of your Notebooks.

• Microsoft OneNote is great for adaptation into GTD. If you click on the picture over there, you can see how there can be different Notebooks (for instance: Home, Work, Personal) with different Section for each project. Within the Sections come your GTD familiars:@Next Action
  @Action
  @Someday/Maybe
  @Waiting On
  @Finished

You can create as many projects as you like as well as however many pages that you need. This NoteBook has just gone on sale for the low price of $9.99. Look at the bottom of that page and click on the image for a larger view. This NoteBook is fully customizable: templates can be changed, pages can be added and you can add as many Projects as you need. I hope that you find it as useful as I!

In the next post, I’ll go into detail on how you can use OneNote to share NoteBooks over networks and on multiple computers as well as

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