Using OneNote to effectively plan your workload

 

    OneNote is my best friend. It's the first thing I open when I sit down at my desk in work, if you're not using it for planning, I suggest you do, and this guide will tell you how I utilise it to create my work planner.

Notebooks, notebooks, notebooks

    To begin, you will need to open a notebook in OneNote. Think of this notebook as a traditional tabbed paper notebook, where you can have different sections that you can easily navigate except you have unlimited sections and unlimited pages.

    Here is the basic set-up you get:

    Above is my set up (ignore the 'Sept').

My planner set up for OneNote:

1. Notebooks - one for each month.
2. Sections:
1. Monthly - Where I put all the tasks I need for the month, monthly follow up lists for members of my team ect.
2. Weekly - Where I put all my weekly tasks and other weekly routines.
3. Planner - Where I plan every day.
4.  Quick Notes - pretty self explanatry.
3. Pages - these are all the pages where I write. I also have a monthly planner here, which I'll share later on.

I'm not here to tell you how to plan, but I find this is the best way. It's easy to navigate, you can easily share files as a pdf and e-mail them out for printing if needed.

Monthly

In my monthly section, I have a page that lists all of the tasks that required doing in the month, I then transfer these to a monthly planner which looks like the below:

    This is pretty useful to plan an overview of your whole month. I get this template from Notegram which has some great tools to use for OneNote and they save directly to your Microsoft Account.

    I have a few more other pages for things like lists of tasks I have asked colleagues to do throughout the month, and accounting things.

Weekly

In my weekly section, I have inserted an excel spreadsheet which has a checklist of all of my weekly routines, to do this you press Insert > File

You can put various different documents into OneNote pages, which makes it easy to consolidate everything into one place.

Planner

In my planner section, I have one page for every day of the month. Each page has my list of tasks for the day, and I just tick them off when I'm done.

So, really it is quite a simple set up, obviously you can set yours up however you want, but it really is a one-place-for-all kind of deal here, and it's way better than a chunky work planner, and handfuls of note books.

If you want to see what equipment I recommend for doing this in work please visit my post on Embracing Technology