Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Writer's Notebook: More on OneNote

In a recent blog post, I ruminated about the possibilities for using the OneNote software that comes with some versions of Microsoft Office 2007.  I'm pleased to say that I've been using OneNote both at work and at home, and it has really helped to declutter my life.     

So what do I mean by this?  As a writer, I've always got multiple projects going.  For example, I'm doing editing on one of my manuscripts.  Right now, I'm fine tuning the language in certain sections based on feedback from one of my beta readers.   However, the best phrases often occur to me when the word processor is not open and the computer might even be off altogether.  OneNote is a very lightweight way to take the odd scribbled notes -- from those times when the computer is down -- and file them away under a page devoted to current edits on the manuscript in process.   Later, when I'm ready to edit again, the notes are there, waiting for me to put them to use.  

In my work as a product manager, I've recently been in the throes of a product launch.  This entails a myriad of tasks and a boatload of details.  I've now covered a planning page devoted to the launch with all of these tasks, together with links to a variety of documents which have moved from draft to finished state, all safely under the watch of OneNote.  I know there are other ways of managing such tasks, but OneNote has seamlessly jumped into the breach, aiding and abetting me in this complex project, acting like the assistant  I might have had back in the days before the current lean and mean corporate era.  

My conclusion?  OneNote is the kind of software tool I've been looking for to help me organize my personal life and rely much less on scraps of paper.  I can definitely recommend it as being the most useful software tool I've encountered in recent years.   If you want to try it out, you can either buy the program standalone or get it in one of the many versions of Office 2007.  It's worth the effort. 

Writer's Notebook: Getting Organized with OneNote

At work, I've been playing around with a software tool that is included in Office 2007, a software program known as OneNote.  Both at work and at home, I tend to spawn a lot of ideas and if I don't capture them -- quickly -- poof, they're gone. 

I started hearing about OneNote a few years back, as one of a wave of programs that try to help you organize your ideas.  I've been using a program called Ascend at home for many years for managing things like To-Do lists and capturing miscellaneous notes with their Red Tab feature.  At first blush, OneNote is a much more powerful way to capture notes and create links between related items.  I've been doing this kind of thing for years, but in an improvised way.   When Word added the capability of hyperlinking, I used it to manage projects that involved interaction between multiple documents.   When I took notes at a standards meeting, I'd create a master document and use it to link to all of the subsidiary documents.  Later on, the notes would be turned into meeting minutes and -- in somewhat different form -- into my standards newsletter, Human Communications Digest.  

So, what does this have to do with writing?  My newsletter example above shows what I did for non-fiction writing projects using Word, but OneNote is actually designed for capturing notes and organizing projects, so it is much slicker.  

I tend to work on multiple writing projects at once and ideas do pop up about phrases I want to include in a new draft, entire new chapters that coalesce around a new direction for my characters, or perhaps, entirely new novels.  I'm rather visual in my thinking style, so it really helps me to map things out before I get too deep into a new project.  In my writing notebooks, I have a couple of very interesting pages, where I drew a map of the dimensions I wanted to explore in new novels and then showed how the ideas connected.  In two cases, there was enough there so that I started thinking about the characters who would inhabit this novelistic world.  I then took the more traditional tack of writing a rough chapter outline and then started to fill in background information on the characters.  I did all of this in a hard copy notebook, but I really would have liked to have an electronic tool which could have supplemented my hard copy and helped me organize it. 

OneNote looks like a tool that would be very good for this application.  The GUI looks like a notebook, complete with tabs, so it's visually very friendly for a writer who has been working with paper notebooks.  It's very easy to start a new tab, perhaps to jot down notes about that project that's in your mind and then put them aside until you are ready to take the next step.  If you've already got other documents, it's easy to set up hyperlinks.  

I'm starting to use OneNote for some work projects, but really want to get it going at home for my writing as well.  I'll report back on my results.