OneNote a forgotten tool that can enhance workplace productivity

Many managers may be overlooking an available computer tool that can help them get more organised in meetings and improve productivity, writes Dermot Crowley.

I was recently asked to develop a short training session for a client on the use of Microsoft OneNote. They had recently moved to an activity-based workplace environment and were trying to move away from paper as much as possible.

OneNote is an electronic note-taking tool that has been a part of MS Office for a number of years now. It is a very powerful tool, but it is totally underused. In fact, in most cases, people do not even know that it is in their list of programs.

OneNote is designed to take the place of a paper notepad in the modern workplace. Users can open up different notebooks, divide their notes into different sections and create pages for meetings, projects or research. It is pretty much a spiral notepad on your PC.

Notes can be typed or, on a tablet PC with screen-writing capability, can be handwritten. For most, I suppose OneNote just seems like MS Word on steroids – useful for some things, but not a replacement for a trusty pen and paper. Admittedly, on the surface, OneNote looks like a direct replacement for your notepad.

This is the very reason that I believe it has not had the up-take it deserves in most workplaces. People see it as just an electronic replication of the paper tool, and they think, “Why bother? It is just as quick to write it down, and I don’t have to lug my laptop to meetings if I use my pen and paper”.

To really appreciate the value of a tool like OneNote, we need to go beyond just using digital tools to replicate how we used our old analogue tools. At a minimum, we need to use them to augment our abilities. To get maximum impact, we need to evolve our use of these tools.

Replication – OneNote as an electronic notepad

When we use our digital tools to replicate how we used to do things using analogue tools, we achieve a slight enhancement at best. If we just saw OneNote as an electronic way of capturing our meeting notes, and having them electronically in one place, then our pen and paper might feel like a better option in many situations.

At the replication level, OneNote provides a centralised store for all of your meeting notes, project notes or research. It also has pretty much limitless storage space and is very flexible to use. But is that enough to make us take the plunge and take our laptop to our next meeting?

Augmentation – OneNote as an information database

To achieve an augmentation of our abilities, we need to understand the nature of managing information. The real problem with taking notes using a pen and paper is that we are storing the information where we capture it, not where we need to find it.

For example, you might go to a meeting about an upcoming project and capture the notes in your paper notepad. The problem is that you might not need to access those notes again for three months, at which point you have moved through two notepads and may have trouble recalling where the notes are. Information only becomes knowledge when you can recall it easily, when you need it.

Applications such as OneNote allow quick and easy recall of your notes through tools such as search. A keyword search will quickly find the project notes, no matter which notebook or section it is in. OneNote also provides a flexible structure to organise your notes.

Each notebook has a limitless set of section dividers, and each section has a limitless number of pages. The fact that the search function cuts across all of these places in OneNote means that you can take advantage of the organising structure without having to rely solely on it to find your notes.

A final augmenting feature of OneNote is the ease with which you can capture content. You can type, write and draw very easily, especially if you have touchscreen capability. But add to that the ability to insert pictures, spreadsheets, emails, voice or video recordings and links to online articles and web pages. These can either be pulled into OneNote, or pushed in from the other applications. Very clever.

Evolution – OneNote as a knowledge hub

While we can all benefit from augmentation, there is another level to which to aspire – evolution. The people who I have worked with who are truly realising the value of OneNote have seen a massive shift in their productivity. They are using OneNote to connect the dots and collaborate with others in a powerful way.

This is because OneNote is more than a personal note-taking tool. It is a collaboration tool. Team notebooks can be set up and shared with the other members of the team. Everyone can build the agenda, or they can share project data in a meaningful way.

OneNote also connects with your other productivity tools such as MS Outlook, and allows an evolved way for users to organise themselves. If you are in a meeting and capture an action, you can press a button and it schedules the task into Outlook. Or you can create a meeting agenda page and pull the meeting details and attendee list straight from your calendar.

You can use tags to highlight certain items such as ideas, actions or questions, and bring all similar items together in a view that searches across all notebooks. It is very handy for seeing what meeting actions are still outstanding?

So have a look in your programs menu to see if OneNote is a part of your arsenal. If it is, give it a go. Take your laptop to your next meeting or, if you use an iPad, install the OneNote app and try that. By the way, most organisations use MS Office products, so OneNote is the obvious tool to use in this context. If your organisation does not, Evernote is a similar app and very popular with Mac users.

It is time to get on board with the 21^st century tools that are designed to meet the productivity demands of the 21^st century workplace. It is time to evolve.

Dermot Crowley is the founder of Adapt Training Solutions, a Sydney-based personal productivity training and coaching organisation which specialises in the smarter use of technologies. For more details, visit www.adapttraining.com.au or www.dermotcrowley.com.au.