Microsoft OneNote: My Best Tips and Practices for OneNote Users

All right, good evening everyone. Uh, this is Randy Dean, the Totally Obsessed Time Management Guy and Email Sanity Expert, and I wanted to make a new video for you tonight, uh, per a request from several of my clients. Uh, they were hoping to get a video on some of the best ways to use the Microsoft OneNote app. And so what I've done is I've put together a little video that talks both about getting started with the OneNote app as well as a whole bunch of ways that you can use the OneNote app. And so if you've already got your OneNote app set up and you're pretty good with the use of the OneNote app, I'll put in the comments below the video tonight where you could jump forward to start the video to get into more of the content on some of the best practices and best tips for using this for enhanced productivity. But if you're sort of new, I would recommend you go right from the start and walk all the way through. So let's dive in, make this thing happen. Now, the first thing that I recommend that you do— now, this is interesting, there's two ways you go about this. I recommend that the very first thing you do if you're new to OneNote is download the app on your phone. Because as you can see, this— I did this for my Android device. I just installed it and then I set it up. Once it was installed, I opened it up and I— it allowed me to basically, uh, set up my Outlook account, which is the account that's linked linked to my Office 365, now called Microsoft 365, account. And by doing that, that basically tied those together so that it's working with the Office 365 account that is on my primary work and personal PCs. So, so I basically got that set up first. And what I found was by doing this, it actually made it a little bit easier for step 2, which was then to go into my, uh, Microsoft 365 icon in the taskbar on the bottom of my screen. Open up the OneNote app. And so by doing that, what happened was it allowed me to then go in and open up the OneNote app in full version and form. As you can see, I actually just brought that right up on the screen. And now this OneNote app, which is tied to my Microsoft email account, is now syncing to the OneNote app on my phone, which is also tied to the Microsoft account. And all of this data is being shared across all the different devices just by utilizing the Office 365 platform and the OneNote app in sort of browser form here on the device, as well as on my smartphone. So as you can see, a lot, lots going on there. But basically, just by doing this, it makes it really easy to tie these together.

And then once you tie them together, the first thing that you're going to want to do is think about the different notes that you're going to want and the different notebooks that you're going to want. And as you can see, um, one of the things that I do with— from basic setup, I set up several notebooks. I have my own personal notebook, I have— I set up a family notebook, I set up notebooks for some of my key, um, agents and business partners and interns and things like that.

So I was just sort of thinking, who might I want to set up, uh, notebooks related to possibly sharing information.

And several of these notebooks that I created were actually set up so that I could specifically do that, set up shared notebooks with shared notes inside of those notebooks so that we can do true, real collaboration using the OneNote app. Meaning, if they have the OneNote app and feature on their device and I have OneNote on my device, I can set up a shared notebook and the two of us or more can all work together. Actually, my family, I have my wife and my two daughters included. So, you know, basically we can do interactive stuff, and I'll show you some of the stuff that that means that we can do a little bit later. Now, adding a notebook is really easy. You just come down to the bottom of the screen and hit Add Notebook. And let's pop back out and come out here into the OneNote app. And as you can see, you can come up here to the top, you click on Notebooks, and then you come down to More Notebooks. And if you'd like, you can actually come down here to the bottom and hit Add Notebook. And, um, you know, YouTube channel, create notebook.

And now by doing this, what's going to happen is there's going to be a new notebook included into my OneNote app called YouTube channel. And here's what's cool, I could create a new section, uh, and let's just call this video ideas. That's the name of the page, which is basically the note. And then the section, I could also switch to, uh, switch the name and do a right-click, Rename Section, and put in Video Ideas. And then Section 2 is Rename Section and say Monetization. Easy for me to say. You know, so I could go all the way down through this and start building a whole series of things related to my YouTube channel. And if I wanted, let's say I was working with a producer or I was working with another third party on some of this information, I could make this a shared notebook simply by coming up here to the top when I'm in the notebook and then hitting the Share icon, which would then allow me to bring up the ability to send out email invitations to the people that I want to share this with. So, you know, this is just some of the basic setup that we've got inside of here. And so that's one of the very first things that I'm going to recommend you do here is get in and think about the notebooks that you might want to create, you might want to share. For your different projects, clients, activities, events, partners, etc. Just think about what kind of lists that you're going to want and need. And then once you make the lists and you built your shared notebooks, as we've already discussed, then you can have a little bit of fun with it. For example, let's pop out here and let me sort of show you one of my basic ideas. I'm going to go back to my shared one with my family, and notice that I've got household and I've got vacations. Now the vacation ideas, this is This is sort of cool. Take a look what I've done here. I've listed a whole series of future vacations that my wife and my daughters have mentioned they'd like to do. We were actually just talking about this today, so I built this. Now, one of the cool things that you can do inside of here is notice here at the top, I went up under Insert, and one of the things I could do is picture or online video. If you go under pictures, you can go to From Online, and one of the things that was pretty cool is I went in and I just searched I saw Yosemite on my list, I searched Yosemite, it brought up pictures that I could drag right in. The other thing that I did is I went out to the web, and let's go out here to my Google page. Let's see, I think it's right here. I did a search here on Google for information on PDFs for a trip to Paris. I found this cool guide on the, I guess it's CIGIC page, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. But it said you can get a free travel PDF, so I downloaded the guide. And then here's one thing that's really cool. I was able to take that downloaded guide and drag it right here into my item. And if you take a look here, I even put, you know, a little title over here, Paris Guide. So basically, you can not just have words inside of your notes, you can bring in additional outside content, pictures, PDFs, attachments. You can bring in online video. You can make an audio voiceover here. So let's say I have several ideas about this project. I could make an audio voiceover. And if it's a shared item, that means people could log in and listen to the audio right here from this item. So there's quite a bit that you can do inside of here. Now, let's keep rolling. So, you know, we talked about setting up the shared notebooks. Let's roll forward and go a little bit further. Shift-Function-F5. By the way, that's how you take a PowerPoint and quickly jump it right out to presentation mode. Um, like I said, you can add multiple people to the same notebook. You can change individual settings on the notebook when you hover over the notebook and then right-click, and it'll give you the option to rename the notebook like I showed you just a moment ago. You can move things around. You can pin the section to start. And one of the key things I wanted to show you is down here at the bottom. This is where you can set up password protection. So if you want to make it a shared notebook, you invite the people, but maybe before you invite it, you set up a password that you give to everyone you're sharing with to help make it even that much more secure. So, you know, just a few things that you can do here. Then what you're going to want to do is once you have some notebooks set up, then you start making pages. Now right down here you can see Add Page, and here is where you can actually make individual notes. When they say pages, I think notes. And so one of the things that you sort of might want to do before you start setting up all your sections is to think about what different kinds of notes that you might want to have, because that will lead to what sections you might want to have. For instance, you know, I made the YouTube section, then I thought of a couple things underneath the YouTube section that were related to video development. Um, you know, so quickly you can think about what kind of stuff that you have here.

And notice that once you create some of these notes, uh, like I showed you the honeydew one just a moment ago, You can actually go in here and, you know, do quite a bit of editing to your individual pages also.

So you can change the settings here as well. And, you know, one of the ones that's sort of interesting is that, you know, you can actually set as a default template.

If you have a certain way that you like your notes to look, once you have one set up, then you can basically go in and utilize a tool like that to make all of your notes look sort of the same way.

Now I mentioned the Honeydew one. Let's take a quick peek at that one since we're in here. I'm going to pop back out. Let's go to my household and let's go to my Honeydew list.

Now I want to show you a few different things that I was able to do inside of this one, which is pretty cool. I started out with a basic note. This is the stuff I want to get done, um, around the house this spring, and, uh, weeding the garden, building the raised bed.

Now, so I saw that, I said, well, wait a minute, Why don't I go take a picture? I just built this last weekend. It's a raised bed for garden. I need to fill it with soil and then we're going to do our planting after we get past the last frost. You know, putting in flowers. Now this year I'm doing something different. I wanted to get seeds. I went out to YouTube and I found a very highly rated video about how you start seeds for your flowers. And I actually put in the link of the online video right here. From that YouTube channel. I just copied the direction of it and I dropped it right in right here. And then the last one is I'm gonna add a new set of steps to the side of the deck. I actually use the drawing tools in here, and you know, here's the pens at the top with the black and the red and the blue. I actually use the drawing tool to build a little schematic of what I want to do with this set of steps that's going to be coming down from the side of the deck. And, um, you know, notice that I, I sort of laid out, you know, the short legs that would be pounded 6 inches to the ground, 2x4s along the base, the big large major plank across the top. But before we put the top plank in, uh, or the top plank in, that is, I want to put concrete inside the box to, uh, set it up and also maybe line the edges with some bricks that I have on hand just to make it a really solid structure. And so, you know, I built a schematic right here inside of this that's going to help me when it comes the time to actually get started on this project. And I just did that in a few minutes sitting here using the drawing tools and the related text tool that's right here at the top. So this gives you some more ideas of some of the kinds of things that you can do inside of here. Now let's keep rolling. So we talked about some basic settings and how you can actually bring some of that stuff in. Let's keep rolling forward. One of the things that I've already sort of alluded to is that you actually have page tools here. That means that they're more than just notes. I mean, these are— the pages are your individual notes inside of OneNote. So don't let that confuse you. When they say page, I say no, it's a note. But what's interesting is if you look at your top headers, you have a lot of different tools. Let's pop back in and take a look at some of these tools that I was talking about. From the Home tab, you've got some pretty basic tools like Insert, Draw, View. You can change the kind of text that you have. Let's say I want to say the first thing I want to get done is the raised bed garden soil. Well, I could take that one and I could bold it. Then let's say the second thing I want to do is get the mulch out front. Well, maybe I'll italicize that one. As you can see. And, um, that gives me a little feeling when I'm looking at the list. Okay, those are the things I want to work on first. Maybe I integrate those things then into my Outlook task list or calendar, which I can jump to down here at the bottom of the screen. Um, notice also that, uh, you've got some different formatting tools. You can actually set up a checkbox. I'm going to talk about that one in a little bit. And, um, you can do some other things under the Insert tab. You can insert a table, You can insert a file. I've already shown you how I attached a PDF from another thing. But, you know, one of the things that you could actually do is, um, let's say you've got an email from a client. You could save that email in a .msg format, put that email onto your OneDrive, and then import the email file right into one of your notes. You could do a Word doc. You could do, um, you know, pretty basically any type of file that you want to get. You can actually go out here and search your OneDrive and start bringing stuff in from those different places. You see, I can bring in like, um, you know, some of the different documents and files that I have out here. So, um, you know, uh, lots of different things that you can do inside of here. We already talked about how to bring in pictures. We talked about how to bring an online video. You can bring in hotlinks. And I, if I wanted, I could do a voiceover for this particular note. We talked a little bit about the drawing tools. You got a text tool. You've got your different pens and highlighters. You can add in shapes that you'd like. You know, you've got a ruler up here. And here, of course, is a very important tool, eraser. I use the eraser a few times when I was building my little step schematic because drawing with your mouse is not quite as easy as drawing with your hand. Although what's interesting is I do have a touchscreen. Let's try something here. I'm going to hit that. And let's draw. This right live. Hi everybody, hope you're having fun. So see, you can actually do some fun stuff here. You could do handwritten notes if you have a touchscreen, um, device that you're building these notes from. Now let's go back down and keep talking a little bit more about some of the things that you can do inside of here. It's time to get into the best ideas and practices and discussions. I've already shared a few But now I really want you to think about how to leverage this for better personal and professional productivity. And so let's dive in and talk about some of these ideas. Now, the first thing I wanted to share with you, which is sort of fun, I created this thing that I'd like to call the note of notes. And when I say it's the note of notes, it was the very first note I created. And what I did is I put under Quick Notes, I made a note called Note Ideas. And as you can see, I've got, you know, do you want a task list that you want to build in here? This is actually a pretty good place to build a task list, either overall comprehensive task list and/or project or person-specific task list, a goals list, a priority list, bucket list, hot lists for different people, packing lists, things like that. We're going to talk about these more as we go. Now here's one interesting thing though. I want to make a little side note because I would imagine that perhaps I have some people here that are using some of the other tools like Google Keep or Evernote or the onboard Notes app on an iPhone or the Tasks and Notes app. And if you are, pretty much all of these ideas I'm sharing could be used on those platforms too. I would even maybe make a recommendation to consider, should you use some of your note apps that you have, like OneNote, maybe you reserve for work-specific notes as we've been talking about, and then maybe you use Google Keep or your iPhone Notes app for your personal notes.

And that way you're building a little separation between the two, and that way the content in each note app or note area is separated and firewalled.

Now, I will tell you something. If you work in a situation where you're under FOIA or HIPAA or FERPA or Litigation risk.

That's not just a recommendation, that's a strong recommendation. Separate work from personal because that limits some of the risks that you have that all of your personal stuff gets opened up. So you might want to consider how you want to set this up. But now with that little disclaimer, um, notice that one of the things that I've done is I've created different sections. And let's take a look at some of the things I've built in here. My projects and priorities, my hot lists, my meetings. I actually have one in here in golf. I'll share with you what I'm doing in there, which is sort of funny. Uh, my shopping list for different stores and supplies, client communications, vendor communications, agent communications. We already showed the honeydew, which I actually moved into that other notebook, which is now a shared notebook with my family. So, um, and then what you're going to do is within each of these areas, you're going to add in the specific notes and/or, as they call them pages to sort of fill up what's inside of the notebooks. So let's go in. First, let's talk about projects and priorities. And in this one, it's pretty straightforward. What I usually put in here— what are my goals for the upcoming year? I build this here at this every year over the holidays. This year got a little bit crazy with the coronavirus outbreak, but I'm actually spending more time because of the corona— coronavirus outbreak, since I'm working here from home a little bit more. Working on things like my YouTube channel and on building my online programs and activities and trying to build my webinar business with a number of my clients. So, you know, when you get down inside here, what's your goals? What are your work and personal projects, priorities, activities, events? You build it each year, you try to reference it at least once a week, and then you integrate action items into your task list and calendar. It's sort of like going old school. Honestly, this is one of the first things that I did when I used to help people set up their planners in the early 1990s. And one of the key things was, is have a list like this. So let's take a quick peek at this. Let's pop out into my, uh, OneNote. Let's move up to my, uh, Randall's notebook. Let's go into projects and priorities. And here you go, here's my priorities. So you can see, uh, new client development, web streaming and webinar sales, um, working with my daughters on some of their, uh, sporting and performance activities. We were going to go to Europe this summer. Doesn't look like that's going to happen now. Um, and, uh, you know, I've been working on some new book projects, things like that. Below this are my list of people. These are the people that I integrate with quite frequently, and I'm going to show you something very interesting when you move to hotlists in just a minute related to these people. And below that, I've got my individual projects, activities, events. Here's my daughter's sporting and performance activities. Building out the course on virtual meetings, virtual office. I just launched that a week or so ago. New book efforts, online branding, new client development, web streaming and webinar sales, fitness— taking advantage of this downtime to try to get a little bit better in shape— YouTube channel, as you're here right now. You see, I built this whole thing out. Now, if I wanted to become even more specific, I could add in some additional information under each of these mainline items. What people are working with these tools and are projects with me? Um, what are the due dates? Um, when should I be starting? You know, so you can add in as much detail or as little detail as you like. Now what I'm trying to do is review this note at least once a week and then integrate those items that need to happen into my task list and calendar in Microsoft Outlook, which is a whole other program that I teach.. But just having this, this overview note really can help you take it to a whole new level. So this just gives you, gives you some ideas. And notice that underneath my projects and priorities, I've actually then built some specific notes for some of the different projects like e-learning, new book ideas, fitness, client development, and venture cap. Now I haven't filled out those notes yet, but what I've done is I'm sort of showing you the structure that you could have specific project notes. And under those specific project notes, you could actually set up, you know, a lot more information and bring in some of the outside tools. You bring in documents, you bring in links to information resources, you could bring in pictures like we've shown earlier for a lot of these things. Now, one of the things I want you to think about though, should these projects be right here under your own personal notebook Or should you maybe make those projects into a specific notebook like my e-learning enhancement project? And now if you take a look at this, look at this, one of the things I put in here, I wanted to make this a shared list with my entire team that would be working with me on this. And take a look what I've done. I've actually made it a shared website task list. And what I did is under the, um, Insert tab, I believe it is, or no, the Home tab, Uh, take a look at this right here. You can actually set up a checkbox. And so I've actually made the website task list here, and I've got all of the items that need to happen related to a website update I'm about to work on, who is responsible for those items, and what are the due dates. Now here's the interesting thing about this. All I need to do now is make sure that I have this notebook set up to share with Joe, Jill, and Ellie, and if I've got all three of them sharing this, they can come in and see the task list and even edit the individual task items on the fly. Now, this is actually a pretty cool way to get a project team or an activity team or an event team to all be on the same page together. You could build these interactive task lists and information sharing notes and activities so that people can all come together to get that information as needed. So, so keep that in mind. You know, you might want some personal notebooks with your personal projects that are all for you to manage and keep control of, but then maybe you want to make the shared notebooks so that, you know, you can actually get multiple person collaboration, which is one of the critical capabilities and functions inside of OneNote. All right, so, um, little thing on that. Uh, we talked about projects and priorities. We gave you a little idea here. Let's, uh, move forward and talk about what's next. Here's another critical one. I think this just— this is just easy. This is easy. I want you to build a notebook called Hot Lists. And, and what it is is these are, um, your key people.

And it was Something I learned actually, oh, must have been close to 30 years ago, back when I was learning how to manage planners, from David Allen, who wrote the book Getting Things Done. Uh, one of the things he said is he said you should just have little notes in your planner for all of your key people. And one of the key things you're doing with those notes is you're just writing down everything you need to talk about with those key people. A note for each person, you know. So do you have critical co-workers or a supervisor you're interacting with on a pretty regular basis? Critical critical customers, critical vendors. Maybe you have even some notes for your family and friends. And you're just writing down a hot list of things you need to talk about with those individual people. And you have one note, or as we say in Note— OneNote, a page for each person. And that way you can have everything discussed. Maybe you even make them into shared notebooks. So let's take a peek at this. I'm going to pop out here. And notice that if I go back up here, here to my primary notebook, I actually have hotlists. And I have like, here's one for Brisbane. And one of the things that I did— Brisbane is an intern for my business working on some database stuff for me. One of the things I did is I went out and actually made a snip of my last email. I actually used my snipping tool, I made a snip, and I just pasted it right into here. So next time when I speak to Brisbane, I can re— quickly find the email. I don't have to go search for the email in my Outlook, it's right here. It might have been a little better if I would have got the date on that email before I copied it over. But by having this, it really allows me to keep on top of this. And I have hotlists for a whole bunch of different people— some people that I work with, some vendors, some clients, and even my, uh, wife. I have a note for her. But now, once again, maybe what I should do instead is have a shared note like this where we can integrate and collaborate. So she can pop in on this note at any time. She can add stuff to the honey-do list. She can add stuff that we need to look at for the electrician or the plumber. Um, notice one cool thing about the plumber one. I actually went into, uh, I believe it was the view function, and I made it look like a sheet of paper, which is sort of fun. Um, you know, just some different things you can do. And I already showed you the vacation list. So these are interactive lists. I even added my daughters in on this so they could throw ideas down in if they'd like. So you can actually make this sort of a fun and interactive situation if you'd like. Now, let's keep rolling. We talked about the idea of hotlists. Here's a really critical thing you can do with your OneNote. You can actually utilize this for helping to plan better meetings and execute your meetings better too. Now, what you could do is have a notebook for all of your regular meetings. You could even make shared notebooks for your critical meetings so that all of the regular attendees for the meetings can share the notes related to the meeting. And what you could do is inside of here, you could track possible agenda items for future meetings. You could also, um, track and capture the past meeting notes. And notice this, I've actually brought this in from an Outlook meeting request. One of the things that's interesting is you can actually, as you're in the meeting, take notes from the meeting and integrate it right into the OneNote app right out of the appointment inside of your Outlook. It's actually one of the standard buttons on top of a new appointment when you make a new appointment in Outlook is to actually build and share meeting notes. Um, you could track delegations and due dates following the meeting. What is the task? Who owns the task? When are they going to get the task done? Um, you know, you could put in shared documents and files in here so that people don't have to go searching for this stuff— Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, PDF documents and information. You could even, when you're building the agenda for the meeting, put in your prep materials and handouts inside the notes so everybody knows that that's where they go if they need to do some prep prior to the meeting. So, you know, that, that one makes a lot of sense. It's sort of, you know, the whole idea of having hotlists for each of your individual people and having a consolidated place for each of your critical ongoing project or team meetings makes a ton of sense. And especially if you set it up with that interactive sharing, it truly becomes a dynamic tool that allows you to do just so much more out of your individual interactions and your group and team interactions. Now, the other thing you can do, we already talked about this, is you could build a shared task list. And I already shared this with you. I showed this idea, you know, I've— under my e-learning project, I wanted to have a website task list, and I built it using the checkbox capability. And what's nice about this is as people come in, let's say Joe gets this done, he can pop up here and checkbox it, and then we know, okay, that one got done. You know, maybe he could even put in a little note, finished on 5/8, you know, things like that. So it's a shared capability and it allows you to build this together. You know, you could even have an area below this, maybe questions. You know, so if something unexpected comes up, your questions and problems, questions, issues, and problems. You can get creative with this stuff. You know, this is another idea of something that you could really do with this. We already talked about having a hot list for the next things you need to talk about with people. You could take this the other way too. What, what if you use this as a communications tracker for each of your critical clients, your critical vendors, your marketing PR activities, legal activities, finance and accounting activities? What you could do is you could set up communication tracker notes. One for each critical client or each critical project or each critical vendor. And then what you could do is utilizing, you know, some of the tools that are in there, you could then easily copy in the text from critical emails, critical text messages, or IMs. You could track notes from active ongoing discussions, both by phone or in person. You could track in, you know, the content from meetings and drop that in here too. Now, I have to make a disclaimer. Be careful. You're making written evidence of items here. If you've got significant litigation risk, you know, sometimes they— I've heard, you know, be careful what you put in writing because you're never 100% sure who might end up with that in their own hands. You know, now that being said, From the positive side, think about having notes that are tracking the communications across this. Now, you might use this in integration with the meeting notes we've already discussed, or the hot lists, or the project planners. And basically, you're copying some of this information maybe in 2 or 3 places. One is as a tracking mechanism, one as a planning mechanism, and one is a looking forward mechanism. You know, so there's a lot of capability here. And then the last really major tip I want to give you here: clear your mind. Most of us are walking around with a whole bunch of crazy lists in our head. I want to give you some ideas right here. Now, we already talked about the project and/or general task list and shared task list. I already talked about the goals, priority, project list. Hey, what about a bucket list? Now, you could have two bucket lists, one for one for all the things you want to do at work or in your professional career, and one for just all the things you want to get done in life before you kick the bucket. We already talked about hot lists for people. Maybe you should have hot lists for an entire team. Meeting agenda items, shared project task list. And now let's get into some fun stuff. Office supplies, tech and software needs, packing lists for business and/or personal trips, or where you're making presentation. 800 numbers for all the major airlines, car rentals, and hotel companies if you're a frequent traveler. By the way, you can usually go find lists like that out on the web and then just make a copy of the text from that web page and drop it into your OneNote so you don't have to go looking for it. Um, how about everything you need at all your individual grocery stores? And you could have notes for each individual grocery stores, although with that I might recommend you might want to look to see if there's an app. You know, there's, uh, apps like Grocery IQ. We're using the Shipt app, S-H-I-P-T. Which basically allows us to get deliveries from our local Meijer, local Target stores. We also have the Instacart app for Kroger and a few other stores. We already talked about electrician, plumber, handy person, car repairs and maintenance guide, what do you want to do in garden, packing list for trips to the beach, camping, things to do on a rainy day when you got two teenagers in the house. You know, I used to play competitive tennis. Not anal at all, I made notes about each person I played and what their tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses were. Golf yardages. I actually have it set up so that I could have a note for full swing golf yardages, pitch shots, chip shots, punch shots, choke-up full swings, and even how to adjust my putting stroke when I'm playing courses I don't normally play. I'm not anal at all. No, I'm not trying to impress you with my golfing skills or ability, by the way. I'm just trying to impress upon you what's all the stuff in your head. Because apps like OneNote or Google Keep or the Notes app on your iPhone or Evernote, Tasks and Notes, there's a whole bunch of them out there. They can help you clear your mind of this stuff. Ski trip packing list, ideas for investments, books to read, movies to see. You could do inventories of your garage, your basement, your attic, your dressers, whatever it is. You could have that information. Random ideas, future biz ideas, and what are you gonna write your next novel, or maybe the next great self-help guide on how to use OneNote. Wait, don't do that. All right, so, um, and then the final tip, this is sort of fun. I've been teaching how to better use Microsoft Outlook for years. Just recently I found out something pretty cool. If you look under your Productivity panel or your Apps list, if you're using Windows 10, you're going to have an item in here called Sticky Notes. Okay, now these Sticky Notes, this was something I hadn't really used much before. I discovered something interesting. Let's pop out real quick. I want to go into my Microsoft Microsoft Outlook. If you use the notes function down here in Outlook, or let's say per chance you're using the icons— I'm going to pop down here and switch the icons so you understand how this works. Compact navigation, hit OK. The notes function right here, this is the notes. Now I've been teaching this for years, and one of the interesting things is, see, look, here's, here's my golf ones right inside of here. Full swings, pitch shots, punch shots, choke-up full swings, etc. Exactly what I just described. I've also got my priorities note. I show this in my Outlook classes. Now, one of the things I was under a misconception on up until recently was that there was no good way to get this information easily onto your related smartphone and/or tablet device. Uh, and that's why they were recommending you switch these notes to the OneNote tool. You know, so instead of, you know, having these in Outlook, you just put them in OneNote. However, interesting thing, if you get the OneNote app on your phone, inside the OneNote app you can see both the formal apps that I've been showing you here on the screen and notebooks. You can also see on the Note app on your phone these sticky notes. Now let's go back and take a look at these Outlook notes again. Golf, interpersonal, meetings. And I showed you some of the golf ones. Now let me show you something pretty cool. I'm going to pop down here. I'm going to pop in and I'm going to open up the Sticky Notes app. Now it's going to launch the Sticky Notes app, and as it's loading the notes, take a look, there's my golf ones right there and some of the other notes that I've got inside of here. These are the exact same notes that are in here. And these sticky notes will show under the sticky notes little tab inside the OneNote app on your phone or tablet. So that means that if you have been making notes here inside of your Outlook, you have access to those notes utilizing either sticky note app on your computer and/or the OneNote app on your phone. Phone or tablet.

Wow.

A lot of stuff. All right. I hope you got some good ideas. One of the things that I'd like to ask for you to do right here— I'm going to end this right now. One of the things that I'd like to ask for you to do is if you're doing something that you think helps with productivity or personal organization or execution, You know, efficiency, any of those types of things. Send me an email at randy@randalldean.com. I'm going to put that at the bottom of the screen and tell me what it is that you're doing with your OneNote that I didn't feature here, because I know there's more ideas than what I just shared here. If you'd like to find out more about me and my programs, including my Outlook programs, uh, on both email management using Outlook, as well as time, project, people management using the other functions in Microsoft Outlook. Um, check out my website, randalldean.com. I also have content for people that use Google, smartphone, tablet users, and people trying to run better meetings. Uh, you can also subscribe if you like this video. I recommend that you consider that. I'm trying to produce more of these videos because of with a bit of the work slowdown and stay-at-home workers now. So I'm going to be adding quite a few of these. And if you'd like to get a whole set of tip sheets— productivity PDF tip sheets is what I call them— on time, email, related tech management for both Outlook and Google users, Office 365 users, just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll be happy to share that information with you. So I hope you got some good ideas. I hope that you now sort of see the scope of what's possible with the OneNote app and the different things that you can do with this app, both on your computer and on your related smartphone and tablet devices, and maybe syncing it up to your home computer a bit too. And with that, I'm going to say we are done.