Stay Organized with OneNote 2007

For many years (basically since becoming an adult) I had an increasing chaos in my life. I am someone who has lots of ideas for projects I'd like to undertake, items I want to read, things I want to learn more about, websites I want to explore, and on and on and on. For years I would keep paper scraps and post-it notes around my desk and elsewhere with things scribbled on them. I would sometimes grow frustrated with this and transcribe them into a simple text file on my computer. While doing this would clear up my desk for a few days or weeks, it didn't last. And then I'd end up with these text files with unorganized notes in them, along with a fresh pile of paper scraps and post-its.

On top of this, I was also carrying around a lot of ideas and other information important to me in my brain. My gray matter was getting seriously overtaxed by this. And worst of all, I hate to forget things -- I mean I really hate it -- and starting several years ago I found myself forgetting stuff more and more often... and I was only 30 years old, not 75!

And of course technology, the Internet in particular, in a sense only made all of this worse, since it provides so much information at your fingertips -- so much to read and see, so little time!

A little over a year ago this information overload and anarchy reached crisis levels for me.

Fortunately, technology came to the rescue. There are many software applications, both desktop apps and web-based, that are intended to help you organize your "stuff" -- your appointments, your to-do lists, your reading lists, websites to visit, people to correspond with, phone numbers, addresses, and so on. But the one I discovered a year ago, and that I have been using consistently ever since, is Microsoft OneNote. This is a new app in the Office family (2003 was when it started), and it doesn't come with the Standard or Professional office suites.

I've been waiting to mention this here on my blog until the 2007 version was released and I had it installed. Visit that link to download a trial version -- check it out! If you try it and like it, you can get it for less than $100, and see the discounted price at Amazon especially.

So what can you do with OneNote? Well, the structure of it is: Notebook, Tab, Page -- and then content on each page. This is patterned on the tradition of paper notebooks with those colored tabs. I find this to be a very intuitive approach, and more than enough structure for me to categorize and organize all the data that I want to keep track of in OneNote.

What can you put in a OneNote page? Anything really. Text obviously, and formatted as paragraphs, lists, etc. Plus graphics, hyperlinks, entire webpages, entire files -- that's right, you can embed entire files like PDF or Excel files, and it makes a copy of that file along with the Notebook.

I mostly use it for just text and hyperlinks to websites. But perhaps someday I'll store richer objects in my OneNote notebooks as well.

Here is some text from the OneNote 2007 Guide that comes with the software (and is loaded with great info, tutorials, and ideas for how to use the program), that I think accurately describes what it is about:

OneNote is an idea processor, a notebook, an information organizer — some even call it an "add-on pack for your brain". Many people find OneNote indispensible once they start using it and we hope you do too!

OneNote can help if you need to:

• Make sure you don't lose any information that you think is important
• Organize scraps of information that don't fit well into e-mail, calendar, or formal documents
• Gather and refer back to notes from meetings or lectures
• Collect research from the Web or other sources and annotate it for yourself or others
• Keep track of what you need to do next and not miss anything
• Work closely with other people on a project sharing notes and files

I especially like the description of it as an "add-on pack for your brain" -- that is how I think of it!

Something in particular I like about this program is that it promotes good, epistemologically sound information grouping practices. That is, it is very hard to end up with a chaotic OneNote notebook, thereby just duplicating in electronic form the chaos and overload you are trying to clear away from your old approach (or lack thereof). It promotes healthy organization through the Notebook/Tab/Page system, and in particular I think through the use of the tabs. There are only so many tabs you can display horizontally on the screen. At first this might seem like a limitation of the application -- that is what I thought initially. But then I realized that when you hit 7-9 tabs in a notebook, you should probably think about restructuring -- either move some that are related together to a second notebook (which is easily accessible all the time still), or if some have just a single page in them, perhaps they don't deserve to be separate tabs at all.

At Element K we call this kind of grouping principle the "chunking principle": when we create courseware, we try group topics into lessons and lessons into courses such that we don't have any really large groups (or really small groups either).

This is also similar to what Objectivists call "The Crow Epistemology", from Ayn Rand's remarks in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology:

The story of the following experiment was told in a university classroom by a professor of psychology. I cannot vouch for the validity of the specific numerical conclusions drawn from it, since I could not check it first-hand. But I shall cite it here, because it is the most illuminating way to illustrate a certain fundamental aspect of consciousness--of any consciousness, animal or human.

The experiment was conducted to ascertain the extent of the ability of birds to deal with numbers. A hidden observer watched the behavior of a flock of crows gathered in a clearing in the woods. When a man came into the clearing and went on into the woods, the crows hid in the tree tops and would not come out until he returned and left the way he had come. When three men went into the woods and only two returned, the crows would not come out: they waited until the third one had left. But when five men went into the woods and only four returned, the crows came out of hiding. Apparently, their power of discrimination did not extend beyond three units--and their perceptual-mathematical ability consisted of a sequence such as: one-two-three-many.

Or consider this example from human perception. If you look at a rectangle you know immediately that it has four sides, but if you are shown a 13 or 21-side figure, you'd have to count the sides to know how many there are.

My point here is just that I think there is good reason that I find OneNote to be such an effective tool, because it reinforces, or is at least consistent with, the way our brains work in some important and fundamental ways.

And all of this is only scratching the surface... I won't discuss here the program's search capability, Outlook and other email integration, Save to PDF feature, extremely powerful tagging capability, shared notebooks for collaboration, the ample documentation, tutorials, and ideas for using the program that come with it... and on and on.

I have some friends and colleagues who are big on personal organization. I'm sure they've got their own tools, that are similar to OneNote, and some are perhaps better in some respects. And they might even be free. So perhaps OneNote isn't "best of breed", but I sure love it.

But my point with this blog post is two fold. To introduce you to OneNote, true. But also to note the issues of information overload, and the value that such programs -- whether OneNote or others -- can have in your life. If you find yourself inundated with ideas, information, websites, books, articles, blogs to read, and on and on and on... hey it is the information age afterall!... you owe it to yourself to spend a little time, and perhaps a little money, to fix this situation! Try OneNote... you might be really glad you did.

Lastly, I'll note that my wife Susan uses OneNote also, and is just as passionate about it as I am. So its not just me!