There can be only One(Note)

I am a serial note taker. Back in the early 90s at journalism school I learned shorthand, and passed the 100 words per minute test you needed to make your way as a reporter (even then we were surprised we weren’t allowed to use recording devices).

It has been a fantastic skill to have - I can take verbatim notes and follow the conversation, freeing up a fair amount of time that would otherwise be taken speaking to people, then asking them to repeat key points for me to write down.

So during lockdown I have waded through thousands of pages of A4 lined paper as I sat through meetings and discussions about site lockdown, cautious construction restart, further lockdowns and the huge amount of positive work the organisation managed to deliver despite the crisis.

But recently I have had a revelation, and it’s called OneNote.

OneNote has been sitting there, unloved at the bottom of my screen, for years. I never really wondered what it was for. Idle curiosity had me open it, then shut it again when it appeared to be nothing more than a basic version of Word.

But then last autumn I was involved with a team who were using OneNote effectively as a place to keep things, and my eyes were opened. I’ve since started using it as a tool to help me deliver internal comms - and I’d like to share a few of my discoveries here.

• You can create notes about a meeting - linked to your calendar. In each calendar entry there’s a OneNote button. Click on it and you can save a new page in your files which automatically contains all the detail from the meeting and allows you to add your own notes and context.
• You can type like you’d take notes. Just clicking on the page anywhere starts a new text box. It’s confusing at first but once you’ve got the hang of it, you immediately see the benefits. Someone said something half way through the meeting that links back to the statement at the beginning? You can link the two easily by just starting a new text box at the top. An idea comes to you about a question you’d like to ask? Start a new box away from the flow and jot it down.
• You can create a never-ending filing system. It takes a bit of thinking about to start, but all of a sudden you have a tabbed system of notes that makes things so much easier to find.
• You can cut out a whole part of the comms writing process. Because you’re typing your notes direct, into a system, all of a sudden you’ve cut out a big pull on your time - no more searching through notes, transcribing and re-writing.
• It automatically saves as you work. No more hundreds of word documents open at the bottom of the screen, waiting to be saved (this may just be me).
• You can use it to store emails in an organised way - hallelujah, no more searching back through the Inbox for that email from a week last Tuesday. Just click on the OneNote button in Outlook and the email gets immediately copied into a new note, under whatever tab you think best. What’s more, you can add notes to the note the email is contained within, giving context. And even better, it also copies the attachments along with the email itself. Which leads me to my last, greatest discovery…
• You can use it to free up space in your inbox. If, like me, your work inbox is limited to a paltry 200mb, you’ll find yourself constantly surfing a fine line between “your inbox is nearly full” and “your inbox is full, you may not be able to send or receive further messages”. I work in comms, and unfortunately that entails people sending me photos and PDFs. Constantly. Now, hey-presto. I can click that OneNote button and the email and all its attachments are copied elsewhere, meaning I can delete the original and free up space. So much better than the previous method of saving the attachments somewhere then deleting them off the email - never a great way to keep track of stuff.

The above may seem obvious, but together they have made a huge difference to my working week. And the opportunities don’t stop there. By sharing documents using OneNote I can see how we could stop a lot of pointless rework - for example, when proofing our internal newspaper, we currently have to place the PDF on a shared drive. By the time everyone’s taken a look we have four or five copies, each with its own amends, that then have to be collated onto one further copy. This shouldn’t have to happen… however, we need to figure out how to do it.

I hope the above has been useful to someone. And as a relative newcomer to OneNote, I’d be really interested to hear how others are using it to improve their working day.