Microsoft One Note

I have become quite a fan of the Microsoft One Note tool.  Its already in the MS OFFICE suite and it helps me to create good notes when tackling my projects.  Date and time stamps are automatically added at the top.   Let me review my format for my project notes:

ATTENDEES

• Joe
• Stan
• Fred

NOTES

What was discussed.  I tend to type as much as I can during this time.
More was discussed
Even more was discussed

ACTION ITEMS

1. Do this first
2. Do this second
3. Do this as well

Another good point of MS One Note is that you can cut and paste in emails into your notes or pictures, or whatever you need.  So after the meeting, I clean up the notes above and then I add a Summary of the meeting to the top of the email and send that out to everyone.  The summary is great because execs don't want to read through every line of your notes but they will read the summary.   Keep this in mind.

Now that I have talked about organizing the meeting notes, how about organizing the One Note area.   You have a Note book a section, and a page.   I work with 5 business units.   I have a notebook for every business unit.   Under the notebook, I have a project in a section.   Under that project, I have my meeting notes under the page.    When that starts to get crowded, you might have to create additional sections or notebooks to clean that up a bit.  But its a great tool.  Notes auto save for you so that's a plus and you can sync them to the cloud for multiple devices to access.