Daniel Escapa's OneNote Blog

This is a useful article that parallels my own analysis of the to-do list problem. I have to catalog my work projects across several different categories in my work plan, and this was my main motivation for getting OneNote in the first place. I would just add one idea to Ralf's excellent article.

I don't keep my tasks in a notebook of their own, but, instead, I have action items scattered across four or five different notebooks and several sections in each one. I might come up with a new task from an email, from an offhand thought I come up with while solving a problem, or a note in an article I'm reading (or some other place). Wherever the thought strikes me, I create a tagged to-do item that starts with the date of creation and a brief mnemonic of the project it belongs to, e.g., "2007 05 25 testing cycle", and a reminder of the work to be done.

The "Tag Summary" then becomes the integrating factor for all tasks, wherever they are located. I can do a first-order sort on the summary list using the "Group tags by:" dropdown list to look at them by date, by text (alpha), or, perhaps most useful, by the section they come from. I can further limit them to only those not yet done using the "Show only unchecked items", or I can review the entire history by unchecking the box.

I have pretty much left Outlook tasks behind (still using 2003), but may reconsider this if/when we get 2007.

Thanks for the article!