Discussion on:

Leverage OneNote for better organizational collaboration

Are you using OneNote in your organization?

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note. You may want to follow my bio for a link to my e-mail address - as sometimes I miss questions that pop up much later on these sort of blogs.

But feel free to post questions here in the forum too - if I don't answer, we have a lot of helpful people here at TR who are likely to answer you.

Um, putting things into one note looks like a nice alternative to using outlook to file things but the way to do it seems complex from your description. You create the page in one note then go to outlook to send it to the new page then go back to the page and name it?
I don't see the average office worker thinking this is at all the solution to just dropping the email into a folder in outlook. (drag, drop, one action no going back and forth to another application.)
While one note seems like it works for you and you seem very detail oriented, most people will just be too lazy and leave it in outlook.

The issue is if you want to be a typical procrastinating office-worker who doesn't do the things up front to give you a performance boosting advantage down the road.

Seriously. This may look like more work up front, but it actually saves you tremendous time and makes you far more organized and efficient down the road. Anyone who looks at this and says, "I don't have time to do all of this," doesn't get it. If you do this, you'll gain more time back than you spend. You won't waste time searching through hard to navigate and difficult to organize folders in Outlook, you'll keep your e-mail box cleaner, meaning you won't miss important e-mails in a flooded in-box, you'll remember deliverables and ARs and be able to hold others accountable to theirs, making your projects proceed smoother and less likely to stall.

It takes work, effort and discipline up front - and most people aren't willing to make that investment. The ones who do, will be the ones who outperform their peers.

I like OneNote and use it for my own projects, but haven't really used the Outlook integration much. It doesn't look like there's a way to reply to or forward these emails from OneNote once they are there. Am I missing something? Do they essentially lose their "email" nature?

HI Donovan,
Thanks for an very useful article. I teach onenote and my clients are particularly interested in the collaborative aspects of the program. My biggest challenge with these folks is helping them actually integrate the program and it's many aspects into their daily schedules. There's a mental shift that must occur and with most busy adults, they tend to fall back on habit because that shift takes energy away from other important concerns. I'm currently working on a whitepaper that addresses this precise issue (using vs learning). Looking forward to your insights in future articles. Thanks again.
All the best,
Dawn Groves

Anyone wanting to keep essentially all of their emails may want to look at a product called "MessageSave" (Google it). The program is an add-in to Outlook and runs just under $50. The advantage is that it will allow you to drop an email into an Outlook folder and then it is automatically saved to a folder outside of Outlook. I have tried that using local (C drive), attached (USB drive) and networked storage on another computer and it works flawlessly. This is just one of the great things the program can do, but for some of my wifes sales people it would be the best thing since bread and butter. The transferred emails (with attachments included if desired) can be opened from the external storage area just like a regular email and can be replied to or forwarded just like a regular email that would be in Outlook. Once steup it is a simple drag and drop to the Outlook folder that has been mapped. No copy and paste, no creating a page, renaming, etc., just Drag and Drop.

But you can just drag and drop an e-mail into a folder on your drive or desktop and it copies the e-mail and attachments as a .eml file onto that local file structure? I must be missing something here?

Yes, you are correct, you can drag and drop. The difference is that it copies rather than move the file, also, the desktop folder needs to be visible which can be a problem if Outlook is covering it. MessageSave has a multitude of bells and whistles available also. If you have your folders where they can be seen and emails dropped on them and you have no need for the other functionality and you don't have a problem with going back and deleting the email that you just copied in order to keep your pst file under control then, yes, why spend the money. This program will not be right for many user, however for those email packrats it could be very handy.