A
year ago, I
wrote about how I used OneNote flags to coordinate tasks according to the
"Getting Things Done" philosophy. OneNote 12 goes worlds beyond the original OneNote as a
platform for "GTD," so I thought I'd write about how I've adapted my
original system.
One
of the essential ideas in "GTD" is maintaining as few
"collection buckets as you can get by with." Within Office 12, the
two programs that are most likely to be used as collection buckets are Outlook
and OneNote; my premise is that while Outlook has "tasks," OneNote is
by far the superior program for managing them. In my system, Outlook is used
for its Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts list, while OneNote is the central
organizing tool.
The
key to using OneNote as a GTD tool is that OneNote can instantly gather and
summarize flagged items and group them by name, and filter them so that only
unchecked items are visible. Once set up, this gives you immediate access to
your "next action" items:
To
do this, you have to customize your OneNote flags, a simple process that is
marred only by the fact that instead of acting on the underlying notebook
(which you'll share between computers, as we'll discuss later), customization
is on a per-machine basis. So you have to perform this process on every
machine.
In
"GTD" every multistep task is a "project," every single
task is an "action," and the next physical action you need to do is
the "next action." The heart of GTD is breaking projects down into
actions and next actions, so that your
to-do list is a set of achievable tasks "Buy 10 pounds of nails at
Home Depot" rather than overwhelming things like "Build the
house."
Additionally,
I break down my projects into 3 categories: "Urgent" projects on
which I should be concentrating, "Ongoing" projects, and
"Deferred" projects (some people call these "Fallow"
projects).
With
that in mind, I customize my note flags. I use open checkboxes for actions, and
starred checkboxes to indicate projects. I use green, blue, and yellow to
indicate urgent, ongoing, and deferred categories:
You'll
notice that I additionally have a "Waiting" flag assigned to Ctl-9
and that the "Next Action" and "To Do" flags have an @
prepended so that they "sort" to the top of my "Note Flag
Summary" view. Another important keyboard shortcut is Ctl-0, which clears
all notes on an item. So now, you have assignment of actions and projects near
at hand.
Organizing
Projects
The
original OneNote had a design philosophy of using a single notebook, with many
sections, many pages, and many subpages. OneNote 2007 has a much more flexible
philosophy, with multiple notebooks and hierarchical sections. One of the
biggest decisions you can make in a OneNote-based GTD system is how you will
organize projects -- with notebooks, sections, or pages/subpages?
To
be clear, you can make a project just using a hierarchy and note flags:
But
generally, "real" projects involve gathering data and thoughts and
meeting people and lots of sub-projects: in other words, they typically involve
gathering all the other stuff OneNote
excels at. And this is really the key reason why OneNote is perfect for
"Getting Things Done": it's not just a "To Do List" manager
or an outliner. Unlike dedicated outliners, it doesn't impose an outline or
hierarchy on everything you do. That's very important: to be able to take the
note, capture the thought, etc. before
it's categorized / placed within a hierarchy.
For
me, projects are best organized as either page/subpage combinations or as
sections/subsections. Do not create a
section for every project: it clutters your notebooks too quickly. Currently, I
primarily use page/subpage combinations for personal projects and ongoing
themes (blog entries, exercise goals, shopping lists, etc.) and use
section/subsections to organize clients and projects (as a contractor, I create
a subsection for each billable contract, and use "Print to OneNote"
to keep convenient copies of the estimate / invoice / payment process.
I
use a minimum of notebooks: Personal, Work, and Archive for my GTD-oriented
activities and then a couple of others dedicated to my creative outlets and
hobbies. When a task is checked completed, it is filtered out of the "Note
Flag Summary," but during the Weekly Review, I delete completed trivial
tasks and move finished projects / sections to the Archive notebook. (Of
course, I visit and re-prioritize my projects and tasks.)
Perhaps
my favorite feature in OneNote 12 is sharing notebooks between machines. With 7
machines, including 3 Tablet PCs, I may be an outlier, but even if you just
have two machines, shared notebooks are an incredible boon. Essentially, this
is one of those "it just works" facilities -- when you create a
notebook, say that you are going to share it between machines, and, bang!,
OneNote keeps them synchronized -- even when
both are open simultaneously! It's fantastic, I can be writing on my
Tablet out on the porch, get stuck, go inside and do some keyboard-intensive
research, pasting into OneNote, go back outside, and everything is synched
perfectly.
Special
bonus productivity program:
The
other essential program to keep me productive is Sciral Consistency, which is almost perfect
for tracking repeating tasks with soft deadlines.
As
you can probably infer, you create a task and set "minimum" and
"maximum" days for each cycle: do the bills every 10 to 15 days,
exercise every 1-2 days, download Website logs every 20-40 days, etc. Here, you
can see that I haven't been exercising enough 
and that I should haul trash
and sweep the driveway in the next couple of days.
There
are only two improvements I'd desperately love for Consistency: a version for
my PDA (synchronized, of course) and the ability to attach a note to a
"check," which would make Consistency an awesome training log.