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OneNote as a Task Management Tool — My System for task management

OneNote 2013 and OneNote in general is a very useful task management tool. It is really designed for note-taking and organizing your notes. When it comes to task management, its main purpose is not to organize your tasks unless you use it together with Outlook tasks, but I have developed a pretty good system that works well for me by utilizing some beautiful features of OneNote.
How did I end up using OneNote?
Over last 9–10 years I have spent time trying to improve my organization skills and as a result of that, I searched for tools that can simplify my professional and personal life. I liked the simplicity of Tasks application on early Blackberry phones and I was a big user of that app. I also went through the phase of maintaining my to-do list in text files and managing them via some useful editors such as Notepad++, Editpad, and CrimsonEditor. As my role and responsibilities changed and as the need for rich text format notes increased, I needed to find a tool that is Microsoft Word with better organizational features. That tool ended up being OneNote. I call OneNote IDE / Visual Studio for notes and tasks; if you are a tech person, you know what I am talking about.
What exactly do I use OneNote for?
- Taking notes in meeting
- As a knowledge base application (aka my Wiki)
- Reading emails and saving a useful piece of information/email into my Wiki in OneNote
- Keeping track of tasks that are current
- Keeping track of tasks that are in the backlog
- Organizing the tasks and all the details for my projects
- Sharing notes and to-do tasks with the team through a shared notebook in OneNote
- Team collaboration through a shared notebook in OneNote
Why OneNote?
It is a complete solution for note taking and organizing notes. If you use GTD (Getting Things Done) concepts, then you can use it for task management. However, if you expect to be reminded to do a specific task, you will either have to integrate OneNote with Outlook tasks or find some other product that had alerting system. Please watch my YouTube video below to see the system I am talking about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiI_AERTCYo



Thank you for reading this article. 

Almir Mustafic


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