Being an avid blog researcher, who takes copious notes, as well being self-employed with lots of different projects on the go, I need to be organised.
Having tried various methods for note taking that were lacking in some way, I am now a firm fan of Microsoft OneNote. This program is built into Microsoft Office (at least since the 2003 version). It sat there for 3 years unnoticed and unloved until my son put me on to it a year ago.
I originally used it for my blogging research notes but, having got to know the program better, I now keep all sorts of details and information in there. I have separate OneNote folders for each of my blogs, websites and clients and a personal one for miscellaneous notes and reminders.
The beauty of it is that I can keep all my notes within the one program and changes are automatically saved. I don’t have to worry about losing information.
The methods for organizing and categorizing your notes are plentiful, making it very easy to find things again.
The image above shows individual ‘Notebooks’ which can be further broken down into folders and groups of folders as shown below:
Each of the folders can contain numerous ‘pages’
One feature I find extremely handy is that when you copy anything from a web site the site address is automatically inserted. I can just copy and past the title of a post for example, and when I want to go back to it I don’t have to spend time searching.
Here is an example:
Pasted from
<http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/07/pimp-my-rice-paddy/>
(I chose that particular post because of the sheer effort and skill that must be involved creating these amazing works of art.)
Not everyone will use Microsoft Office of course so I would be interested to know if there are any other note taking tools that you find useful.
I need all the help I can get in this department. I will take a look at this. Thanks for the tip (and all the others).
I’ve just found your excellent blog. You have some really useful articles in here – so I shall be back for another read when I get back from work. Keep it coming…
It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place.