We have a lot of information to track. Project management has an informal side, which is about quick meetings, brainstorming, problem-solving, and communication. And the notes scribbled on training printouts are rarely useful and have no life expectancy. We need a revolutionary tool to help us remove the barriers that prevent us from easily capturing information.

Tune Up:
Note-taking-a process for understanding, summarizing, and organizing unfamiliar, complex, or difficult-to- remember material-can place considerable cognitive load on the brain when you’re also trying to accomplish another task. You, like most people know how difficult it is to participate actively in a meeting and take notes at the same time.

If you consider note-taking as an individual responsibility and personal accountability, I recommend you to use Microsoft OneNote. Yes, you might have already heard about it. But I think I need to emphasize how useful it is before I begin to post some profound OneNote tips or templates.

MS OneNote is cool. It’s so flexible that individuals can gather information in the way they are most comfortable, which translates to better information. OneNote can provide an excellent, easy-to- learn-and-use tool for capturing and sharing notes across a variety of media.

OneNote can be installed together with Office 2003 but does not require Office 2003 to function. You can use it with Office 2003 or as a completely standalone application. It is different from current Windows utilities such as Notepad in that it supports multimedia note-taking and has a much broader set of features. It behaves just like a piece of paper. You can put the cursor anywhere on the page to insert typed text, ink, or graphics. It also offers note handles that let you drag chunks of notes anywhere you want them.

With OneNote, you can make a screen clipping for your research. It’s so easy.

Whenever typing on a keyboard isn’t appropriate, or when you want to draw and sketch your notes, a pen input device or Tablet PC is all you need to take notes in your own handwriting.

You can mark your notes with note flags so that you can identify notes that you want to return to, remember, study or send to others. You can create up to nine categories and customize their names, icons, and appearance.

There’s no need to save your notes or transcribe the whiteboard at the end of a meeting, because everything you enter in OneNote is saved automatically.