With OneNote, I think the biggest challenge is deciding the correct number and organisation of the notebooks. This post explains the approach that I am currently using.
I use a mix of OneNote, Microsoft To-do, Calendar and mind maps (using Freemind) as my daily driver for staying productive, taking notes and organising information. It’s not a popular stack (because Microsoft’s offerings often are not) and it is also not perfect but it seems to be working for me. With OneNote, I think the really big challenge is creating the correct number of notebooks.
If you have too few notebooks, it feels easy to access and you can quickly get into the notebook and you don’t have to wonder where the information is to be saved. On the other hand, organisation, depth of hierarchy, etc. all become more problematic when it’s all in one large notebook. If you decide to separate into notebooks, it quickly gets complicated – you can end up with too many notebooks and finding where you saved the information might become a challenge.
Over the past couple of years, I have started to centralise on the idea that:
- I need separate notebooks for General Work and Technical Items/ Explorations
- I will change to a new General Work notebook (which I call Corporate) every 1 – 2 years (probably every 2 years)
The General Work Notebook
I call this notebook Corporate and the current version is called Corporate-2025 since I just started a new notebook this year.
I use a mind map to organise thoughts at a high level (names adjusted in the image below for sharing). I’m trying to use this as the organisation for the notebook now – each item in the mind map becomes a section in the notebook.
Sections such as Projects, Products and BizDev are probably self-explanatory. These are supported by:
- General Management: corporate management functions, including reporting and so on.
- Tech Management: managing our teams, chapters, and related functions
- Parent Company: engagements and discussions with our parent company
- Collaborations: industrial, personal and academic collaborations
- Outreach: contributing to societies, trade organisations, standards activities, academia, etc.
- Technology: a holding area for high-level technology ideas and concepts
In addition to these sections, I also have:
- A General section mainly for table of contents, quick information, etc.
- A Scratchpad section for random notes that don’t yet fit anywhere nicely or were quickly noted while doing something else
My General section currently has these special pages:
- An Overview page that explains the organisation of the notebook, links to the sections directly and links to the previous notebook.
- A Year Overview for 2025 – this links out to different notes and pages in the Corporate-2025 notebook itself. I call this the Work Index for the year. If you don’t know what a Year Overview is, you can read this post where I explain how I set it up.
- A page that has a table of public holidays from all our (four) office locations.
- A descriptive high-level overview of what the year likely looks like and things I would like to get done this year.
- The Year Overview pages for 2024 and 2023 copied and pasted into this notebook. The good thing is that the links in those copied pages are to pages within the older Corporate notebook. So, I can actually click from my 2025 notebook into an older one quite easily.
This is a snapshot of the General section.
The Technical Notebook
The technical notebook is less imaginative. It just has a couple of Section Groups and separate sections for each of the deeper technical items where content is organised by database (DuckDB, SQLite3, PostgreSQL), language (Ruby, C, etc.), framework (Rails), tools (PowerBI), etc. The intent is to export much of those notes to blog posts eventually.
If you have a different way to organise your notebooks (or if you find these ideas useful), I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to connect or share the post (you can tag me as @onghu on Twitter or on Mastodon as @onghu@ruby.social or @onghu.com on Bluesky to discuss more).