By allowing team members to easily share their thoughts and ideas, you may be inspired to build on those ideas, provide supporting ideas or artifacts that may not otherwise be surfaced, and generate collective solutions that would not otherwise find their way to the light if not for the team effort. At the core of the ideation process is a shared definition or goal, and the collecting of information and proposed solutions, offered up without criticism. However, with the right tools and healthy habits, team-based idea creation ("ideation") can be a highly rewarding experience, and greatly benefit your organization. While that partially-formed idea may not be of value to you now, it may be relevant to a co-worker, but we're even more quick to self-edit before sharing an idea with team members. Or if it's not relevant to what we're working on now, we don't bother capturing it at all. We often filter our own ideas - if it's not a complete thought, we don't write it down. When people jot down notes, or sit down to write a summary, we are our own biggest critics. None of us like doing it - but if we improved our skills and developed healthy habits in how and where we captured our notes, we would get more value out of the activity.
People are incredibly bad at note-taking, which is truly an art form and takes organization and practice. How good were your notes? Did you copy down the strategy verbatim, and map organize your thoughts and planned actions underneath each point, or were your notes more of a random list of short-term tasks peppered with thoughts and notes that even a week later were confusing and useless? And once the whiteboard has been wiped clean, will any of your notes make sense to you? Members of your team likely sat there, taking down their own notes, while the overview of your project or team goals was outlined on the whiteboard. Think about the last time your team spent more than a day or two discussing a complex problem, maybe working on your strategy for the forthcoming fiscal year. There is tremendous business value in this concept. In some ways, OneNote has become an extension of my brain, allowing me to quickly find and recall information that might be otherwise lost. While it's fun to imagine what is possible through these technologies, and by looking at Microsoft future vision for enterprise productivity, when I tell people about how I use OneNote to capture ideas, develop content, and otherwise retain information, my mind goes back to the first article about the MS researcher who had the goal of improving data retention. All interesting stuff, but in practical terms - not something that is going to help my writing here in 2017. In my mind, this sounds much more like the natural evolution of the Microsoft Graph and personal analytics, with deeper integration into the Office suite, Bing, and Cortana, which would be awesome. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model – the agent will help solve this. "One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. Gates mentioned this in a Reddit AMA earlier this year: More recently, there's been talk about Bill Gates working on a "personal agent" project that may-or-may-not be called ' Office Now' that does much of the same data collection of our work and activities, and then provides intelligent support, when and where needed. At the time, I made the connection between his research and how social collaboration provided many of these same contextual benefits within knowledge management – albeit without the detail of a constantly recorded personal life. He was generating terabytes of information each day, and I believe he was also going back through and doing his best to capture metadata around each, as part of a study of the brain and its ability to recall information.
ADD IN FOR ONENOTE 2011 OFFLINE
There was a cover article a few years back (Fast Company? Inc? Can't remember…) about a Microsoft researcher who was capturing every conversation, every artifact he created, and every online or offline interaction through multiple audio, video, and digital inputs.
ADD IN FOR ONENOTE 2011 HOW TO
I thought I'd share a few thoughts on how to get more out of the tool, and possibly help you increase your own personal productivity. Not that I am an expert in every nuance of the tool, but it has become my primary writing platform - and an excellent resource for information capture and discovery. I can't tell you how many times I've sung the praises of OneNote.