better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Old Things In New Ways

29 June 2014

It’s good to fall in love isn’t it! You can’t predict when it will happen and it changes your life for the better. Well now I have, unexpectedly, fallen in love – with OneNote.

OneNote is a Microsoft programme, designed to hold your to-do lists and meeting notes, webpage clippings and scanned documents in one place. It’s free and can be downloaded to iPad, Android, Macs and PCs. It takes the ideas pioneered by Evernote and lifts them to a new level of usefulness. It also syncs seamlessly across Apple and PC, so my iPad and laptop are happily in touch with eachother all the time.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it makes for a superb note taker in meetings, with the added benefit that you can email your client with the notes before leaving the room. Quick, slick and useful.

And the reason for sharing my new love with you is that this year I have been looking to do old tasks in new ways, in order to increase productivity and make progress with those ghost tasks that are haunting my inbox. A ghost task is one you have to do and you ignore it…hoping it will go away! Instead of leaving you alone, it haunts you!

I have a TA case study to write and am enjoying the writing of it by combining OneNote with my iPad. It’s fun to use (so my inner kid is happy too) and allows me to keep all my notes with me all the time, instead of having to carry around a bulky lever arch file.

If you have a ghost task that is haunting you, then spend time this week thinking about how you can do an old thing in a new way. Maybe change the time of day when you work, or draft notes on a MindMap, or give yourself permission to write one sentence and then stop for tea. Or you can take a look at OneNote and have fun using it as a portable (and free) place to organise your thoughts and collect ideas. Old things in old ways never really work out, if we are stuck, so have fun doing old things in new ways!

Productivity can be fun and it feels good to have said boo to a ghost task!

Next week: Powerful Questions