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Tag: productivity

OneNote: a hidden Microsoft Office gem

Last week I discovered Microsoft OneNote 2007, and I am (honestly) impressed. Actually, the first time I ever heard of OneNote was when I read the FAQ of InkSeine.

OneNote 2007

Here’s part of the product description:

Office OneNote 2007 is a digital notebook that provides people one place to gather their notes and information, powerful search to find what they are looking for quickly, and easy-to-use shared notebooks so that they can manage information overload and work together more effectively.

I have been using a combination of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Notebook and del.icio.us to organize (and capture) information (partially inspired by this setup). The big problem here was synchronization. I ended up copying URLs to Google Notebook since I would never be confronted with them again if I stored them in del.icio.us. There were no explicit links between meetings, documents, and other resources (e.g. websites or short notes in notebooks). I would add gadgets for each of these apps to my iGoogle page to keep an overview. Although I could cope with this setup, it was not ideal. Gmail and Google Calendar are great services which I still love to use, but for quick notes and jotting down ideas I often resorted to paper notes.

Although OneNote is not perfect either, combined with a laptop (or tablet PC) it has the potential to eliminate most paper note taking. To get a good overview of what’s possible with OneNote, have a look at these resources:

A lot of people have been impressed with OneNote and have blogged about it.

Here are a few of OneNote’s features that I like:

  • text search in images and audio
  • audio and video recording with synchronized notes
  • shared notebooks
  • embedding any file as a printout
  • screen clippings
  • the ability to write and draw anywhere on a page
  • tags (e.g. todo, important, question, etc.)
  • calculator support
  • inking support (if only I had a tablet PC)

Here’s an example of how I used OneNote to summarize an intuitive explanation of Bayesian Reasoning by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning in OneNote

Thoughts on speed reading

On Monday afternoon, I participated in a Smart Reading course together with a few colleagues. Although the basic techniques of speed reading were explained, it left me wanting to know more. Since I don’t feel like paying more than a thousand Euros for a full, three-day course, I started to look for some more information on the topic.

If you want more or less the same information that we received in the course, have a look at this excellent overview of speed reading techniques.

For those of you who want to speed read through information on your computer display instead of in books, there is software available that uses the technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to help you read faster. One of these applications is RapidReader. They have a nice video illustrating that reading faster doesn’t significantly hamper your comprehension:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs6CGBlqulk]

There are also some free alternatives, such as Spreeder (an online speed reader) and dictator.

Apparently there is a yearly contest called the World Championship Speed Reading Competition. The current record holder is Sean Adam with 3850 words per minute with comprehension. There were also some famous people in history that could speed read, including Jacques Bergier and USA presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. There are also some claims of a child prodigy that could read more than 400 000 words per minute, but that might be attributed to her photographic memory.

Although a lot of the claims around speed reading are unrealistic and it is surrounded by the typical vagueness of pseudoscience, the idea still intrigues me. I went to the book shop yesterday and found a few books (some exclusively in Dutch, others translated from English) that seem interesting to have a look at. I also included books on Mind mapping since this is the technique used to summarize the books you read. There is another book in English that seems to be recommended by a few people: Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump.

The Dutch books I might have a look are:

Gebruik je hersens Snellezen Mindmappen Gebruik je verstand