The productivity dance; a look at systems Part 2

Your world in OneNote

I am making a few assumptions about you since you are reading this. The first is that you are not too stupid to use Google (that is, you don’t ask someone else questions like ‘What’s the distance to the moon?’ or ‘Who is the president of Botswana’ while you are sitting behind a computer connected to the internet). {As it happens, both these questions are quickly answered using Wolfram Alpha, which I discussed in Part 1 of this series}. So where was I – assumptions. Okay, my second assumption is that you deal with lots of incoming information everyday for your job, commitments, studies and hobbies. And third, you probably can use a word processor.

To navigate through your files on your PC, you probably open an application like Word, go to the file menu and navigate to the folder with your file, open it, edit it and remember to save it before exiting the application. To move back and forth between different files, you have to have several windows open. Microsoft Office OneNote is an information management application that changes all that. I call it the information age game-changer.  It is the student’s dream and the business person’s extended mind. One of the first things you will notice is that there is no need to “save” in OneNote since it saves continuously while you work.  Let’s take a look at OneNote and consider what you can do with it.

This is a OneNote 2010 interface, but the basic features I am trying to illustrate are the same. As I have illustrated in pen on the image, OneNote allows you to create different notebooks (shown in the left pane); in each notebook, you can create different sections (top pane) and in each section, as many pages as you want (right pane). I have notebooks for my research, my other projects (like this blog) as well as a continuously running journal. OneNote 2010 (only available as a technical preview) is dockable to the side of the desktop to facilitate taking notes while using other programs (like surfing on the internet).

Even better, Microsoft OneNote support tablet pcs – you can write and draw and (if you want) use their efficient handwriting recognition to convert ink to text. OneNote's flexibility means you can do just about anything from pasting in bits of information while surfing (this can be done via the screen clipping tool or, in the 2010 version, docking it and using drag and drop), writing chapters of your book, thesis etc, keeping your daily journal etc. With mind mapping (a subject of the next post) now gaining popularity among productivity tools, OneNote can be used for paper-type mind mapping on a tablet. It is, in my opinion, one of the best things Microsoft has ever done (I am very biased).

There is also good cross-talk between OneNote and Microsoft Outlook on tasks and meeting notes, making OneNote a key business and productivity tool. Check the Microsoft OneNote website for more information and see this link for cool ideas on improving your OneNote.

The productivity dance; a look at systems Part 1

This is the first of a series of posts that will focus on certain tools that may change the way you get things done. I will admit that I am obsessed with cool tools, and many a times I try out software just for fun. Here are some cool things I have found that may change your relationship with information. I will start with Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha

You use a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) to look for information. The search engine gives you links related to your search input and you go through them to see if you can hit on exactly what you want. This works very well most of the time. But sometimes you just need specific answers not links. Lets say you want some quick facts about the Zambezi River (the inspiration behind this blog). If you enter “Zambezi River” on Google, you will get dozens of hits and it may take a few minutes before you can gather all the facts you want about the Zambezi River from those links (hell, maybe all you wanted was the length of the river or the countries it spans). But what if there was a computational engine that gave you specific answers not links. In comes Wolfram Alpha created by Wolfram Research. Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine – it is a computational engine which cross-references many specialized databases to produce specific answers to your query. So let’s try “Zambezi River” again on Wolfram Alpha and this is what we get:

Now this is information you can work with! Try it with many other things. Enter your exact birthday (e.g august 25, 1965); enter a famous name (Charles Dickens, Nelson Mandela, James Watson etc) – or just enter the name of a city to find out quick facts about it. Visit the site and before you know it you will actually be getting things done! (http://www01.wolframalpha.com/). For the business minded, it gets interesting if you type in your favorite company to quickly see how well it is doing.

GTD icon David Allen has often said that we suffer not from information overload, but from lack of meaning of the information. Wolfram Alpha gets you closer to finding meaning with the large pools of information you may have to deal with. Give it a try and you will get hooked. If you are a Mozilla Firefox convert, the story gets even better. There is a Firefox Addon that can allow you to get Wolfram Alpha results from your usual Google search – so you get the best of both worlds simultaneously.

Hope this gets you excited!