Organizing Your Notebooks

OneNote® allows for content to be easily moved and organized.  While this is a useful feature, some users find themselves spending a lot of time reorganizing.  The need to reorganize increases due to work/life changes over time.  As we change jobs, get married, have children, buy a home, etc., the amount and type of content we need to organize changes.  As the amount and type of content changes, the way we wish to organize that content also changes.  If you have a daughter in Girl Scouts, for example, you might have a notebook specific to Girl Scouts; and, when your daughter is finished with Girl Scouts, you won't want to be burdened with looking at the notebook every time you open OneNote®.  In that case, simply close the notebook.  This will make it disappear from your OneNote® window.  Keep in mind that you can always re-open it if she decides to re-start Girl Scouts.

Finding a design that works for you can take time.  In order to save you some time, I used the Screen Clip feature of OneNote® to copy and paste a screen clipping of a sample layout from my personal computer.  (See "Sample Layout for Your Home Computer".)  I'll share some tips about using the Screen Clip in a future post.  I even opened a few of my notebooks to give you a deeper view into my life.  From the illustration, you can see that I at least have an interest in entrepreneurship, that I document my knowledge of various industries and disciplines, and that I have worked as an employee and a contractor.  I hope that by opening up a bit, I have provided you with some ideas that may help you get organized quickly.  Everybody is different, so you'll need to decide how you want to organize your own notebooks.  Get started right away so that you can start reaping the rewards of OneNote®.

Those of you who are W-2 employees, may have one computer for work (one owned by your employer) and another personal device owned by yourself.  In that case, you will have two instances of OneNote®, one on each computer.  In both cases, you may wish to have a notebook that contains personal or private content.  You have a few options for keeping your personal content synchronized.  One great option, if your IT organization will allow (and they probably will not), is to create your personal notebook on a shared location outside of your companies network (i.e,. on a service like SkyDrive, DropBox, etc.).  Another option is to manually synch those OneNote folders.  In any case, for your personal instance of OneNote®, I suggest you consider creating a book titled "Personal", with sections/section groups something like:

• Passwords (i.e., a password protected section of pages, with one page per account/password.)
• Emergency (i.e., a section with one page for each type of emergency:  power outage, fire, flood, death of spouse, national security emergency, etc.)
• Travel List (i.e., a section with one page for each type of travel, including the following pages:  individual travel for work, family travel for vacation, etc.)
• Financial Accounts (i.e., a password protected section of pages, with one page per banking institution, including key information on each page:  account numbers, and routing numbers, customer care contact information)
• Registrations (i.e., a section of pages, with one page per personal registration of software including key information on each page:  source of software, URL for downloads, software keys, price, etc.)
• Professional Memberships (i.e., a section of pages, with one page per organization in which each page contains key information:  organization name, member ID, etc.)
• Personal Assets (i.e., a section of pages, with one page per asset in which each page contains key information:  Name/Description of rolling stock, make, model, serial number, photo, etc.)

Below is an image of an instance of OneNote® on my personal computer at home.

Sample Layout for Your Home Computer

Professionally, OneNote® can improve the speed at which people prepare for a meetings; it can improve the quality of your meetings minutes; and, it can improve the speed and quality in which you summarize and distribute meeting results.  There are many other professional uses of OneNote®, and below is a sample design that you can use to get started.  From there, just do what works for you.

Below is screen clipping of a simple layout for your work computer.  This is just something to get you started, but you will need to modify this to suit your needs.

Sample Layout for Your Work Computer

If you found this post useful, please comment and share my post with your friends.  Also consider subscribing to the blog so that you will be notified of future posts.