Seasoned Marketer

Over the years, I’ve found it to be helpful to get more organized.  I used to just do everything by memory (and still do alot).  But at the same time, there is such a deluge of information on a daily basis that it’s worth setting up some sort of system to help stay on track.

Recently, I upgraded to Office 2010.  And part of that package was something called OneNote.  Up until a few months ago, I had never used it.  Didn’t really see the point.

But now, I use it every day.  In fact, I keep most of my notes, my favorites, sites that I have found of interest, topic ideas, work stuff, home stuff, lists of to do stuff all on onenote.

For example, you can setup folders and pages within one note for different topics.  So in my website research topic, if I stumble across a site that think is good, then instead of adding a favorite in the browser, I’ll just drag and drop that link into OneNote in a folder called interesting links.

Just so I can save it and maybe I’ll get back to it when I am writing an article or need some help with something.

The other thing that has helped me out recently is that I am using OneNote and taking more extensive notes and really defining ideas better.  Like if I bookmark a site in OneNote, then I’ll also comment on why I am bookmarking it.  For example, …’this site has a great jquery tutorial that does x,y,z’.  And I get really specific on the summary to help me out later on when I go back over the ntoes.

I can’t tell you how many times I have bookmarked something over the years or jotted down some random thoughts and later on couldn’t make sense of why I wrote that down or why that was important.

The other thing I really like about OneNote is that I use 2 computers, a desktop and laptop.  And OneNote allows you to share the notebook between computers and even between different people.  And that’s come in handy on more than one occassion.

So I know a lot of people use Google and Google calendar and Gmail to stay organized.  And the book “Getting Things Done” is pretty popular.  But for note taking and tagging sites and info, and ideas for projects, I like OneNote personally. 

The only thing I can think of that would make onenote better?  Perhaps an integrated calendar.  Or maybe an integrated rss feed reader while we’re at it.

All in all, I’d give it a solid A.