Over the past year I spent a large part of my professional time operating in “interrupt mode”. At any given moment I could have whatever I was doing interrupted by a question from my team, a request from account management, or a demand from leadership. That sudden stop, change of direction, and resume when finished can derail even the best note taking systems. I didn’t have the best…I had OneNote.
Step 1 - Capture as you go
The first thing I did was start a daily note each day. The title was nothing more than the date (Year-month-day format for consistency sake). From the creation of that note, everything else went into the daily note.
On Windows, Shift-Alt-D dropped a date and Shift-Alt-T dropped the time into my note. Stream of consciousness capture came next with everything I needed to know when I was able to come back to what I was doing at some point. The daily note grew and grew as the day took on it’s normal chaotic character.
Step 2 - Search vs. structure
In the beginning I tried to create an organized section and page structure to make it easier to locate information I needed on demand. Unfortunately, the more time I spent doing that, the less of an impact it had on my information demand urgency. Sounds counter-intuitive I know, but reality often does.
I began restructuring my note taking to match how I would need it in the future, not based on the structures in the tool itself. Adding ticket numbers, keywords, client names, team member names, all of these helped when it came to answering that interrupt question that showed up in my doorway unexpectedly.
Step 3 - Information in, information out
Screenshots into OneNote became a fast friend - capturing chats in Teams and information from web pages for reference. Once I came to the acceptance that the majority of the information I was capturing never needed to be edited, relying on the OCR of the images in OneNote made things much more effective.
On the flip side, rather than writing emails in Outlook I started writing new emails in OneNote and then using the Email Note function to distribute the content. Why? In that way I had a record in my notes of the original email, I could capture responses without needing the entire email thread, plus I could add reference content that didn’t need to go into the email.
Not perfect, but not terrible either
I tried other variants during the year: hand written notes by digital tablet, paper note photos, section groups and sections across multiple notebooks, the list goes on. In the end though, while not perfect, OneNote gave me the opportunity to work around the limitations of the environment and business technology and focus on the job at hand. At the end of the day, isn’t that really all we can ask?
This is a huge topic...and always has been. The organized person had that "right-hand page" of the Franklin Planner or Day-Timer. The disorganized person had sticky notes and scraps of paper everywhere. Today, we have the digital equivalent. One clear, quick place to offload whatever comes is the way to go.