

I use plain text files not only for my writings, study notes and note-taking but also for my goals, organizational, project notes. The files themselves are simple, can be edited on any system, and are future-proof. Rather than a fully featured notes or writing tool, I now have a bunch of plain text files and a lot of them. For me, that solution was “downgrading” to plain text files as my primary means for note-taking, writing, knowledge management and life organization. But sometimes the best solution is one of the simplest and oldest. We live in a world of nearly endless options for productivity and writing software. There are a lot of tools that can help you in this pursuit. They should augment your ability to reason, to develop connections across knowledge, and produce a targeted output. The goal of your productivity, writing or note-taking systems should be to enable you to think clearly, stay organized, learn, and create.

Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is difficult.”ĭon Norman, professor and author of The Design of Everyday ThingsĮxternal aids, especially writing, are the key to sustained learning and a creative life. OneNote is powerful.“The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. My Microserf partisans, embrace this humility!īut, don’t let your healthy humility combine with an unhealthy fear of failure, that will react with humility to produce defensiveness. Gone are the arrogant people looking at your extended hand and saying “Do I need to know you?” They’ve been replaced by mortals who worry about being laid off as well as worrying about whether their market share can be *significant*. There is a healthy humility at Microsoft today. Oops, another analogy from economics just inserted itself. To a GTD person, they are complements, not substitutes. Or, OneNote is Excel, and Evernote is PowerPivot.This post is just a small scream out to the inner Microserfs (The t-shirt with “IBM Weak as a kitten, dumb as a sack of hammers!” alone makes the book worth reading!!!) of my anonymous Microsoft partisans: If I mention “ Evernote” I often hear “You mean OneNote … Right!?!” In my current job, I’m working with a lot of people from Microsoft.
