Zip lining, alternate avenues, and 2 kids add up to 1 WellConnectedMom

You may have heard of her from her popular blog WellConnectedMom, but if not, you should get to know a little bit about Lori Cunningham.

Lori graciously volunteered to sit down with me to talk about herself, her interests and how she’s benefited from using Microsoft OneNote — the app we all know and love. Below is an excerpt from my conversation with Lori.
 

Tell me a little about yourself and your family.
I have been happily married to my wonderful husband for 15 years, and we are blessed with two children, my daughter is 7 and my son is nearly 5.  They certainly keep me running with school, soccer, music lessons, fundraisers, etc. 
 
Tell me about your educational background.
I have a BS in Business (with a marketing emphasis) from the University of California, Riverside and a Masters in Communication Management (with a technology emphasis) from the University of Southern California.
 
How would you describe your personality?
I am inquisitive, tenacious at times, fun, goal-oriented, optimistic, and sensitive.
 
What are your favorite hobbies?
I'm an Internet junkie - I could read articles, research, and work on my blog 24/7 if I didn't have a family that I love to care for.  I also love to travel - my husband and I have traveled to Egypt, Israel, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Canada, and many states in America. Kids have slowed us down a bit, but now that they’re getting older, we are planning more trips. Oh, and I get into a little zip lining from time to time. Love the rush!

What do you most like to do when you are not working?
I like watching movies or our favorite reality shows, and playing with gadgets (I'm enamored by home technology products at the moment).
 
Any charity work?
I have served on the board of Alternate Avenues for the past 6 years. Alternate Avenues helps women and men in unplanned pregnancies decipher their “true” choices.  We provide free pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, consulting, and support through their pregnancies and after wards.  I have enjoyed helping Alternate Avenues increase its size to serve more than three times the number of families today than when I first started working with them.

Let’s turn to OneNote. How long have you been using OneNote?
I have been using OneNote now for 1 1/2 years now.
 
Why did you personally start using OneNote?
I started using OneNote to help organize my life better. I was collecting all this useful information from the Internet and didn't know where to put it so that I'd find it again.  E-mails and bookmarks weren't working for me - out of sight, out of mind.  Eventually the bookmark would break or the e-mail would be archived and I was losing important research information. Next, I began using OneNote to keep the 30+ interview questions I created to ask my mom and in-laws about their lives. I filmed them while I asked them the questions and then typed their answers in OneNote as I interviewed them.  This worked beautifully.  I used their answers to create a great "this is your life" type keepsake book for them. OneNote was a terrific resource in helping me to organize and create their books. The notes may have been tougher to find if I just had them filed on my computer somewhere.
 
Can you describe some of the ways you use OneNote? What do you use OneNote for/to do?
I use OneNote every day.  Since I'm a blogger, I have over 200 websites that I have passwords for.  I keep all of my websites IDs and passwords in a table that I made in OneNote. I refer to it often.  I use the search feature in OneNote to find the website and password in my long list. 
 
I use OneNote also for:

• Keeping track of facts & statistics I find online that I might want to use in an article.
• Press quotes or comments about wellconnectedmom.com to use in marketing materials.
• I created my wellconnectedmom.com's strategy in OneNote and update it as needed.  It's more of a living document because I can get to it easy as OneNote is always open on my desktop.
• I keep my wellconnectedmom.com's Editorial Schedule here so I know the products, special seasonal articles, and time lines I need to focus on.
• I often draft my wellconnectedmom.com's posts there first before transferring it over to WordPress, my blogging software.
• My To Do list.
• Communication between individuals that I want to keep for future reference.
   

What benefits have you seen from using OneNote?
It helps me to better organize and keep track of important information. I like it better than Word because:

• I have numerous tabs (or folders) which contain a number of pages in each folder open at once.
•  I can just click through whichever tab/page I need.  In Word, I'd have to open up a bunch of different documents to achieve this.
• I created my wellconnectedmom.com's strategy in OneNote and update it as needed.  It's more of a living document because I can get to it easy as OneNote is always open on my desktop.
• I like the fact that I can click anywhere on the page to start writing.  I can make side notes in the margin; I can put comments anywhere on the page I want.  With Word, you have to create tables to get a similar, but not as flexible effect.
• I can have open 24/7 without affecting my computer's performance.
• I can easily drag and drop information from one page over to another.
• When I paste information from the Internet into OneNote, it instantly pastes the source URL of that information as well.  This is a very helpful and a time-saving feature.
• I love that I don't have to save my work, it saves automatically, I never have to remember to press a Save button.
• I can easily sign up for as many websites as I want, OneNote is a great place to store and quickly find all of my ID's and passwords.
• I used to keep some of these things in Excel, but I got tired of having to open it up all the time.  Although, I wish OneNote had Excel's cells blended with OneNote's great flexible text boxes.

What personal goals has OneNote helped you achieve or put you on the path to achieving?
I'm going to admit, that I'm not the most organized person.  But I do have organizational tendencies, especially when it comes to the computer. My papers and desk are often scattered, but on my computer, I tend to be the organized person I was meant to be.  OneNote has greatly helped me to keep track of the many projects I'm working on like family history, all of my wellconnectedmom.com's strategies, article content, nutritional info, things to review, info on my kids and parents, home repair, you name it. OneNote helps to keep me focused.
 
If you had to describe OneNote in one sentence, what would you say?
OneNote is a personal digital notebook and planner that helps you to organize your work, projects, and home life, to achieve your goals in an efficient manner.
 

There you have it — direct from the inquisitive, zip lining, family planning consultant, prolific blogger WellConnectedMom! We’ve learned a bit about what makes Lori tick and how she uses our favorite app (OneNote) to get things done. How are you using OneNote? You know we love to hear from you!

-- Ayça Yüksel