Kristian Kalsing

The collection part of the GTD productivity methodology is about having quick and handy tools for capturing thoughts and ideas when they occur and before they are lost again. Microsoft Office OneNote has some great features enabling various ways of capturing information easily and instantly, keeping you productive.

Having effective means of capturing ideas and thoughts when they occur and take note of any other valuable information you come across is crucial for your productivity. Firstly, you don’t want to waste time later on trying to think of what you didn’t capture and secondly, you want to return to what you were actually doing as quickly as possible. OneNote has a number of great capturing tools meeting those requirements, some of which are instantly activated through universal keyboard shortcuts:

• Capturing side notes. OneNote’s side notes are much like an electronic version of yellow sticky notes. They are easily created on the fly from a universal keyboard shortcut and are great for quick notes to self. For example, if someone interrupts you with a message, you can quickly write it down and return to what you were doing. [Windows logo key + N]
• Taking meeting notes. Directly from appointments within your Microsoft Outlook calendar, you can create meeting notes in OneNote. The file is automatically generated with a nice formatted header displaying appointment details such as date, location and attendees. [Right-click an appointment in the Outlook calendar and select 'Meeting Notes']
• Scribbling on e-mails. If you feel a need to add some additional notes or even drawings to an email you can send it straight to OneNote where lots of scribble tools are available. [Click 'Send selected e-mail to OneNote' on the Outlook toolbar]
• Capturing parts of the screen. With a universal keyboard shortcut you are instantly able to capture any part of your screen. The screen capture is forwarded to OneNote where you can add additional notes. This is very useful for creating personal help files if you need to remember how to use a certain system or website. [Windows logo key + S]
• Saving web pages. If Internet Explorer is your browser of choice, then any web page can be sent to OneNote with the simple click of a button. It’s great for capturing news articles or other web content you may want to read offline or save for future reference. [Click 'Send to OneNote' on the Internet Explorer toolbar]
• Recording sound snippets. OneNote also has a slick way of recording audio on the fly. Admittedly, I’m yet to get much use out of this feature, but it’s still pretty cool. [Right-click the OneNote icon in the system tray and select 'Start Recording Audio']

All of the features above are quick and easy ways of capturing thoughts, ideas or other important information registering on your radar. From a GTD perspective, it’s superb that all of these different ways of collecting stuff automatically creates files in the same ‘Unfiled Notes’ folder which then becomes a single ‘Inbox’ you can process along with your other inboxes.

Another great GTD-friendly feature of OneNote is the tight integration with Outlook tasks. When you process the ‘Unfiled Notes’ folder as any other inbox, you can create Outlook tasks straight from within OneNote. These tasks will contain a link back to the original note in OneNote, so when you get down to the actual doing of that task you can instantly access the context of which the task was created in.

Finally, if your phone is running Windows Mobile you can also use the mobile version of OneNote. Mobile notes are synchronised with your desktop notes whenever you connect your device through ActiveSync. This provides you with another great tool for collecting ideas and thoughts on the go. If you’re like me and have paperphobic tendencies then a tool like OneNote for creating and managing unstructured notes is highly desireable.

Kristian Kalsing Work 2.0