Work Efficiency & Organization (1 Viewer)

[Leeroy Jenkins]

I am looking for ideas and techniques that professionals on this board use to be efficient and organized.

I am constantly in meetings and on calls and find myself taking notes often. Sometimes randomly and sometimes in an organized way (dates and subject headings). But it is a pain to go back through multiple notepads to find information from months ago, and I frankly do not have the time to type out all of my notes (nor am I a good note taker on my laptop— I need to write and scribble).

So in that regard I am debating a digital notebook like Remarkable, Super Note, or Boox.

I want to be able to write, and then convert to an editable document in an organized way (be able to save multiple notes from different days on one topic) and be able to search all of my notes as well.

Anyone have experience with these?

For my “to do” list, I simply use a word document with autosave turned on. The first section is stuff for “today” and then I have outlines with more details of ongoing projects. This document keeps growing though and isn’t the best.

How do you approach your daily and ongoing lists?

Any other tips or techniques you use to be better organized and efficient?

If type of work helps guide here, I am in Real Estate & Private Equity essentially and run our company investing strategy and platform. So lots of transactions but also calls with partners to determine their investment appetites and targets.

TIA

 

[zamboni]

I just take notes in Word - enables easy keyword searching.

 

[The Z Machine]

OneNote is better than Word for notes and organization.

But I'm like you. I take handwritten notes, but I use a Moleskine soft cover notebook. Evey meeting gets an entry with meeting subject and date. Since it's 100% chronological it's easy to locate old notes. I have those notebooks going back a decade. The first pages are left blank so I can put in some critical numbers and items I carry over from notebook to notebook.

 

[shuke]

I switched to OneNote about 3 years. Too much stuff to have to remember. OneNote's search abilities aren't super great, but it's better than flipping through notebooks. You'll just have to become better at typing notes during a meeting rather than writing them down.

 

[Andrew74]

I am like you - I write notes but suck at good organization. For day to day tasks I just use Outlook’s Tasks to keep things going. It has worked well for me over the years.

 

[higgins]

I wonder if you can take a picture of your handwritten notes and then attach it to the Outlook meeting notice….

 

[Leroy Hoard]

The less time one spends here makes you more efficient. Probably why I've never been very efficient.

 

[culdeus]

Any one note super user YouTube's anyone follow? Always feel just scratching surface. One time I put something like 5+5= and it just filled in 10 and I legit jumped.

 

[snogger]

I switched to OneNote about 3 years. Too much stuff to have to remember. OneNote's search abilities aren't super great, but it's better than flipping through notebooks. You'll just have to become better at typing notes during a meeting rather than writing them down.

This is where I'm at.
Most times I'm running the project meeting getting info from the user for the solution. Using OneNote I can copy and paste into a "meeting notes" email after the meeting.

For each project I'm working on, I keep different OneNote pages with meeting notes, apps, flows and formulas I've written. Then when the project is finished, I have to create a completed project word document with everything I created for the project.
Using OneNote throughout makes it easy to copy/paste into that document, rather than going back to get it afterwards.

 

[TheFatKid]

OneNote user love being able to drop emails into it, paste screen shots, and customize tags to help with search. I prefer one notebook in OneNote but I know people that use one per major project.

The organization system I use is based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done book. Helps me know if I have capacity to say “yes” to a new idea or project.

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

OneNote is better than Word for notes and organization.

But I'm like you. I take handwritten notes, but I use a Moleskine soft cover notebook. Evey meeting gets an entry with meeting subject and date. Since it's 100% chronological it's easy to locate old notes. I have those notebooks going back a decade. The first pages are left blank so I can put in some critical numbers and items I carry over from notebook to notebook.

I just want to avoid typing (except for editing something) and searching through notepads that are strewn about my office (which is more difficult now with hybrid work). I am working on so many different things at the same time that these notepads are a real pain to search through.

 

[BrutalPenguin]

(nor am I a good note taker on my laptop— I need to write and scribble)

Fixing this would be well worth the effort and open you up to many solutions to the rest.

 

[Gally]

Reading this thread makes me wonder how I have made it this far in my professional life.


I use Outlook to keep track of my schedule and scribble notes in a notebook. I have a fairly good memory and writing it down once usually lets it stick so I can recall it in the future. I am generally not a big note taker in respect to needing to go back and find things. Important issues gets documented in MOM's typically so that is where the recall happens if needed as those gets stored on shared drives for the individual projects.

Bottom line is trying out various things to see what works for you. Everyone retains things differently and figuring out yourself is the best step to get started.

 

[MAC_32]

There are more efficient ways to use OneNote than what I'm currently doing, but even my current manner has been a total game changer. Haphazard note taking throughout the week then less than an hour of maintenance at week's end and my former disorganized mess is now seemingly the only one here that can keep track of operations. Being able to update from multiple different devices completely changed my approach at work.

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

There are more efficient ways to use OneNote than what I'm currently doing, but even my current manner has been a total game changer. Haphazard note taking throughout the week then less than an hour of maintenance at week's end and my former disorganized mess is now seemingly the only one here that can keep track of operations. Being able to update from multiple different devices completely changed my approach at work.

What is your filing system like?

 

[MAC_32]

There are more efficient ways to use OneNote than what I'm currently doing, but even my current manner has been a total game changer. Haphazard note taking throughout the week then less than an hour of maintenance at week's end and my former disorganized mess is now seemingly the only one here that can keep track of operations. Being able to update from multiple different devices completely changed my approach at work.

What is your filing system like?

The most important thing is establishing parent folder needs. You don't want to create one that's so broad you end up with 20some sub-folders, but you also don't want to create one that only has 2 paths within it. Where I have found it to be extremely beneficial is with delegating tasks to my direct reports (they each have a sub folder) and future to-do items. I don't want to clutter up my outlook with things I need to do 3 weeks, 2 months, a year, etc months from now but it needs written down somewhere or else I'll lose track of it. So I created a parent folder title the next year and I have 13 months in there at all times and my 'home' is the current month. When something hits my radar I need to circle back around to I take a guess where to put it then I forget about it until it organically re-appears.

Again, there are way more efficient approaches and I'll keep refining mine, but managing my work has been A LOT less time consuming and stressful since I started doing this.