How my OneNote habit keeps me sane

Warning: Microsoft OneNote can be addictive.

As a compulsive note taker who's not nearly as good at organizing information as I am at collecting it, I rely on OneNote for every project at work and for most projects at home. And I've got company: 

• "OneNote makes it easy for me to collect notes for my classes; my notes & thoughts are more organized." -- Sterling Morris
• "In OneNote I capture any detail I want & connect them directly to Outlook tasks/appts. It's BRILLIANT!" -- Olympia Scott
• "You can email your OneNote files thru Outlook. I made a biz of it by charging my classmates $2 for copies." -- Rey Cepeda (way to go, entrepreneurial spirit!)

(These customer quotes are from Twitter at #office2010 and #join2010 and our Did You Know factoid stream.)

Now, I could dive into an impassioned description of OneNote's many benefits at my job (such as, oh, helping me ride herd on the entire Office Blog?) But my home office is wearing a thin veil of construction dust, so let's talk about life at home.

This month, a strapping foursome (carpenter, plumber, electrician, and tile magician) are remodeling my skanky bathroom. Why? Because a slow leak under seriously old linoleum couldn't wait for the economy to rebound. Work keeps me busy working, so researching every remodeling detail from tile to vanity would have buried me in minutiae and sucked up way too much time, without OneNote's help.

All the project details--phone numbers, pictures, Web pages, shipping dates, crazy ideas, emails, and specs for everything from tile to toilet, showerhead to shampoo shelf--are in the Bathroom Remodel section of my personal OneNote notebook. It's searchable, organized, handy, and accessible. (Searchable is key.)

The only thing missing is my choice of paint for the finishing touches. Here I confess to procrastination. I'm even worse at choosing wall paint than I am at organizing papers the old-fashioned way. Put a canvas in front of me, I'm fine. But four walls I have to live with every day?

If only OneNote could decide for me.  

To learn more about Microsoft OneNote, try these:

• Our OneNote blog
• Top ten reasons to try OneNote 2010
• OneNote 2010 product info
• OneNote help and how-to info
• The OneNote Web App
• Our growing list of blog posts about OneNote from all our bloggers. (I'm not the only one who's hooked.)
• Our free downloadable OneNote notebook templates

And watch this Office Casual introduction to OneNote 2010:

Holly Thomas