Another great post from ihearter Steve

I don’t know about you, but for me organizing is a challenge in part because I don’t maintain a single discipline about how I do it over time.  I get some pieces working, add others, read a good article and think “I should do that”, and next thing you know I’ve forgotten all about the basic steps that helped me improve in the first place.

This happens with OneNote too for me.  The ability to ‘TAG’ tasks to do is a great thing, AND I notice that the more I create lists, say for ‘home’, ‘critical tasks’ at work, other ‘tasks’ to be delegated or develop, I suddenly have 7 or 8 pages with things to do.

Here’s a capability of OneNote I’m learning can help.  Do a Tag summary page and see them all at once.

• On the Command Menu, go to ‘Insert’ and the first choice, ‘Tag’.
• On the ‘Tag’ submenu the first choice is ‘Show All Tagged Notes.’
• Click that and it brings up a ‘Tags Summary’ sidebar that will let you see all your tasks, and group them by Section, Date, etc. You can show checked or unchecked.
• And the really sweet tip here: At the bottom of the sidebar is a button that let’s you ‘Create Summary Page.’  Click that and it creates a page listing all your tagged tasks in the order you’ve chosen.
• I title that with a date and time and print it out so I can see the various threads I’ve created.  I print it out on paper as a handy reminder, and then I go back and tidy things up.

This saves looking all over for things you wanted to remember at the time, but now have forgotten where the page went to.  You can also do this for items you’ve tagged as ‘Outlook Tasks.’  I don’t know about you, but for me this practice helps me find things before they’ve gone missing for too long.

I notice it actually does help me Get Things Done.