RW Makeover: Electronic organizing solutions
Jennifer asked me if I had a suggestion for a good contact manager software program or electronic rolodex.
I use Outlook for my contact manager and it works fine for me. If I were to purchase one, I would purchase ACT since so many people over the years have recommended it.
I like the Task Manager feature in Outlook. You can use it to remind yourself to follow up on a query or any other task. One feature I love about it is that you can right click on an email and move it into the Task Manager folder so when you follow up on an item, you have the original correspondence right there to refer to.
Another one of my favorite electronic tools is Google Desktop which lets you search your hard drive for emails and documents using keywords. It has saved me countless times. Go to google.com to download it for free. If you know that you can find anything on your computer, you will probably print out less paper and have less filing! [Donna Smallin, unclutter.com]
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Dec 11, 2006 RW Makeover
I’ve been using Microsoft One-Note to aggregate all my research and note-taking for the past six months or so, and it really cuts down on the paper filing. Originally made for tablet PCs, it works just as well on a typical desktop or laptop.
Launching the program, you’re faced with a blank notebook page — complete with the familiar blue lines. Just click anywhere on the page to automatically open a text box and start typing. You can create and label tabs within the notebook and add as many pages as you want under each tab. Every time I begin research on a story, I’ll open a new tab for that story, start a contact list on the first page then use subsequent pages for random ideas, website links, interview questions or anything else that needs organized for that story.
Beyond text, you can drag and drop any file into the notebook to create a link to it, so I’ll often “print” web pages to either Acrobat or Microsoft Document Image files and drop them into the notebook, where they appear as a link. It really helps to avoid broken web links and to escape the time limits newspapers impose on web access to their stories — especially for articles that spark a pitch idea I may not get around to addressing for a couple weeks. You can also paste photos, screen shots or scanned documents directly onto the page.
All notes are fully searchable by keyword, and you can create folders to house groups of tabs (I have one labeled “Archives” that I throw my story tabs into once they pass fact-checking). The program also integrates with Outlook, so you can create a new To-Do Task, Contact or Email directly from the One-Note toolbar.
As far as keeping everything in one place, One-Note has been really helpful to me. When an editor or source calls, I just pull up the appropriate page, and every last bit of information I’ve gathered is right in front of me. Plus, cutting and pasting makes it simple to pass info along the chain without having to locate and type up handwritten notes. Maybe most importantly, I never have to dig through dusty filing cabinets.
One-Note is supposed to ship as part of Office 2007, depending which version you get. I’ll paste the web site below in case you want more info.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/FX100487701033.aspx
Wow, Steve! Thanks for that info. You’d make a good salesman for One-Note, because now I’m sold! I remember reading about it when it first came out for tablet PCs. But I had no idea it was available for use on any computer. What a great reason to upgrade to Office 2007.
That’s quite a compliment coming from an organizational strategist — Thanks! One-Note really is a great product for journalists because we have so many random notes flapping around. I’ve been itching to get an Apple Macbook for months now, but I can’t bring myself to do it until I find out if One-Note will be available in the Mac version of Office 2007 (cross your fingers for me). It’s really become the first point of contact for all the work I do.
While I’m back here, another application that’s entrenched itself into my daily work flow is an RSS reader called Feed Demon. I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there; I just followed CNET’s recommendations and ended up with this program. For anyone out there who hasn’t caught on to RSS, it stand for “Real Simple Syndication” and lets you track blogs, news and other website updates from a single window (in my case, this Feed Demon application that looks a lot like Outlook but has headlines and abstracts in the space you’d normally see emails). You just paste the url of the RSS feed into your reader (The Renegade Writer feed, for example, is available at the bottom of this page), and from that moment on, you find out what’s being posted to that site in real time.
I track all the majors, NYT, LAT, CNN, BBC; a bunch of blogs and sites that cover beats my editors would be interested in; daily publishing news like Mediabistro, Gawker and The Renegade Writer; and a bevy of smaller local papers across the country that could clue me in to homegrown stories bigger outlets haven’t reported yet. Also, you can run a keyword search for news articles on Topix.net — which you’ve GOT to try if you’ve never used it — and receive new hits on your search via RSS as new information appears on the web.
I just sit down with my coffee in the morning and consume everything that’s happened over the past 12 hours, then end my day doing the same thing. It can become an easy way to procrastinate, but it’s also the fastest way I’ve found to catch up on 1,000 news items every day. Ok. Maybe I should get back to work now …