Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Psst.  There’s one Office application that I consider to be a nifty little secret weapon on my war against "Information Overload". 

OneNote.

See, I have a major problem with Information Overload.  I get too many tasks, I have too many projects, and I have too many idea & concepts to bounce around in my head.  I don’t do a good job of prioritizing and I need to write things down because my memory is shot for being in the computer industry too long.  (See my previous blog article about the horrendous affects of Email & Instant Messaging on a person’s IQ and attention span: http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!369.entry)

COLLAPSIBLE LISTS

I’ve found that the best way for me to keep organized and to keep track of everything I need to get done has been to use OneNote & its collapsible lists feature.  OneNote gives you the ability to create outlines of content like lists of things to do with sub lists, and then subsequently collapse them or expand them as you see fit.  This allows you to see an entire list of things to do, for example, without having to see all the details. 

 
Creating outlines and keeping them collapsed is an easy way to view lists

If you want to see the details of any one list item, all you do is "expand" the item so that you can see all its sub items or sub lists.

Expanding items is as easy as double clicking the little square to the left of each item 

An interesting feature of this is that the collapsible lists work with both typewritten content as well as handwritten content.  I can handwrite "tasks I need to do" and "steps I need to complete for each task" and have each task "collapse" into a single line item – then expand it out when I need to see the details.  And I can add details to each item in my own handwriting as I need to.

Handwriting can be expanded & collapsed just as easily as typewritten items in collapsible lists 

RECORDED MEETINGS

Probably the most powerful feature of OneNote however is it’s ability to record the audio or video of a meeting and synchronize your note taking to the audio or video recording.  How many times have you heard people rattle off their names during meeting introductions for example, and you can’t get everyone’s name written down fast enough?  Or you phased out during part of the meeting and you’d like to listen in on what was said after the meeting is over?

The recording can be in any number of codecs, meaning that you can make the recording take less than 2MB of space for an hour of recorded audio or for higher fidelity recordings, you can shift to a better codec which may take 50MB for an hour of recorded audio but do so with crystal clear fidelity. 

 
Audio can be encoded in multiple frequencies & codecs 

While you are recording the meeting’s audio or video, you can be taking notes.  This is important because when you PLAY BACK the audio and/or video recording, OneNote will highlight the text or handwriting that you wrote or typed during each section of a recording.

Audio recorded meetings make it easy to type notes about the recording and have the recording mark at what time in the audio stream you typed in your comments.