Using Evernote For Project Management

| 02-05-2021
[RAND-1-100] Comments



Evernote is one of the most handy cloud apps, not only for project management, but for everyday activities. Project managers use Evernote to quickly jot down (or speak) ideas, take random notes, quickly store notable ideas or information from interviews and meetings, and much more. In this episode, I show you how you can use Evernote as your project manager Get yourself enrolled in my FREE Beginners Guide To C.O.D online course and s. Evernote is a great for note-taking, project management and general organizing. But face it, when it comes to task management, Evenote is not the best. Fortunately, you can fix many of Evernote’s shortcomings with a few small tweaks—turning Evernote into the backbone of a great productivity system, including task management. Organize your project info into notebooks. Use Evernote to organize the different aspects of your.

Dann Albright over at the MakeUseOf.com blog wrote a great article about how to use Evernote for project management. In the interest of equal time, I’m taking his points one by one and translating them to how to accomplish the same things in OneNote.

Project

Evernote Project Management Template

Clean out your notebooks

OneNote allows you to create multiple notebooks as individual files and then store them either locally or in the cloud. When it comes to managing projects, I recommend creating one notebook for each project being managed. Doing this gives you granular control of the notebook for your project team as well as preventing accidental changes between projects. If you have a large number of projects you are managing, you can create a notebook and use it as a “program notebook” providing connections to each of the other projects for easier management.

Create Project Notebooks and Stacks

Within OneNote’s notebooks, you can leverage sections and section groups to organize your content. I suggest starting with defining a standard naming convention for your notebook and a basic structure for where you are storing them. If you’re keeping your notebooks in a shared drive, OneDrive, or SharePoint is less important than being consistent and organized.

Create a Master List

The first page in your notebook’s main section should be a table of contents for all the related key information about your project. Adding links (Ctrl-K) to sections and pages on that main page turns OneNote into a mini project website and keeps your team from having to search to find content. I recommend including links to pages such as:

  • Team directory
  • Project Requirements
  • Schedule
  • Document Libraries
  • Reference Links

The key with the main page is it becomes the dashboard for your project. Team members can easily check the status of the project as well as connect to information they need in short order.

Organize Project Notes

Using the sections in OneNote makes it easy to group your content around common areas such as requirements gathering. You can also use tricks such as the [[Page Name]] approach to generate new notes pages on the fly while you are working. The most important features are the searchability of all the notes from within OneNote as well as the addition of file printouts directly into OneNote for easy reference. Keeping your notes in a common space and allowing the team to update and access the information as needed.

Add Shortcuts

Using the link keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-K) on the desktop application gives you an easy access dialog to all the content in your notebook. These links are great shortcuts to your content, making it easy to consolidate rapid access around different topics without having to duplicate content.

Create pages in your notebooks focused around specific topics or requirements and use the shortcuts to connect in relevant content. You can use this strategy to keep meetings on task and on target. The less people have to search and wander around in your notebooks the better off your project will be.

Set up reminders and due dates

Unfortunately reminders and due dates are one of the weaknesses of the OneNote solution. There is no built-in functionality for this so you’ll have to look outside the product to have this capability. The one saving grace is the ability to copy links for pages or notebooks and then paste those links into other tools for easy access. For example, I copy links from OneNote and paste them into Todoist to manage my task list. The same thing can be done for tools such as Trello or Toodledo, with the only requirement being the reminder tool being able to accept links to outside systems.

Develop a tag system

OneNote does not have a “natural” tagging system as per say, but you can leverage the search capability in place of dedicated tags. Add text tags to your page and then search for them to get the main listing of pages that contain that unique phrase. Be aware though that the OneNote search ignores special characters so adding a hashtag to the beginning of a text phrase does not uniquely identify it as a tag.

You can also use the Tags capability within OneNote for easy markup of your documents, but there are several concerns with using the embedded tags you need to consider. I reviewed some of these concerns in my article about Tags and OneNote.

Integrate your other apps

How to use evernote as a planner

OneNote strongly integrates with other members of the Office suite including Outlook, Excel, and Visio. If you work within the Microsoft ecosystem you can leverage features such as shared meeting notes, embedded spreadsheets, and direct capture of emails into OneNote Notebooks. Unfortunately if you’re not living 100% in the Microsoft universe many of these features are not available for you.

You can also use tools such as IFTTT to tie OneNote in with other external systems for managing your information. For example using IFTTT you can have any emails that come into your Google Mail account including a specific set of text in the subject line routed to a OneNote notebook for record keeping.

Collaborate

One of the biggest strengths of OneNote is collaboration WHEN the notebook is placed in a shared area such as a network file share or, even better, OneDrive / SharePoint. You can see what has been edited by whom, review previous versions, and receive visual notifications when changes are made.

One Note for Project Management

OneNote is an exceptionally powerful tool for project managers, as is Evernote. Where the success or failures of the tools come down to is the strategy, implementation, and follow through on their use. Make sure no matter what tool you choose, you have a plan and put it to work. If you have questions about using OneNote for Project Management, feel free to let me know and I’ll be happy to chat with you about your needs. If you’re a Facebook user, you can also join the OneNote for Professionals group to find other ways to get more out of OneNote.

Having spent 15+ years in IT project management, I have an appreciation for the tools out there that make Project Management simpler and efficient. OneNote (yes, OneNote!) is such a tool. Today, I want to highlight the ways a project manager and project team members might use and adopt OneNote when managing projects within an organization.

It is important to note that OneNote by itself does not constitute a project management software. OneNote, in combination with SharePoint Site or Office 365 Group or Planner – will though. So when I talk about OneNote features below, the software is more of “assisting/facilitating” tool that complements the other tools in Office 365 eco-system.

1. Storing and sharing Agendas

OneNote can be great for storing Agendas for meetings. You can create a page for each meeting and name it accordingly.

Moreover, since OneNote, by default is part of all SharePoint sites and Office 365 Groups, you can use it to collaborate and co-author and easily ask your team members with adding items to an agenda for example.

2. Keeping Meeting Minutes

Meeting Minutes are another great piece of content belonging in OneNote. You can use the same OneNote page where you stored Agenda items above and record Meeting Notes, action items and other outcomes from the meetings keeping everything organized in one place. Alternatively, you can create another page for Meeting Minutes and organize it together with Agenda page above into a section.

If you are managing your projects using the Agile methodology, OneNote can become a great tool to keep track of these daily Scrum Meetings. I documented it in this post.

Using Evernote For Project Management System

3. Storing Lessons Learned

Another great way to use OneNote is to capture Lessons Learned on a project. When I managed projects in the corporate world, I used to hold Lessons Learned sessions for every project that I managed. It helped me avoid mistakes in future projects.

And then you can allow users to co-author and contribute to the document – essentially building a Lessons Learned database.

4. Organizing Risks in a Risk Register

Another cool way to use OneNote is to capture project risks. Typically, Risk Register is built in Excel, I also advocate for using a SharePoint custom list for this, but you can also use OneNote and either embed a table or Excel document right on the page.

5. Project Wiki

What really makes OneNote great – is that it can become an easy dumping ground (repository) for any content (images, audio, video, tables, hand-written notes, etc.) that otherwise would not be stored in any SharePoint document library. You can use OneNote’s sections and pages to create a nice project Wiki! OneNote is fully searchable, so you can always search and find what you are looking for.

6. Links

Related to the Wiki above, you can use OneNote to organize and store various links (bookmarks, URLs). Alternatively, SharePoint is also a great place by itself to organize links too – so if that is of interest to you – click here.

7. Business Requirements

I have seen organizations use OneNote for business requirements gathering. Co-authoring capabilities would allow your team member to collaborate and gather requirements all in one place. Speaking of which, if you are thinking of gathering business requirements on SharePoint, you might want to read this.

8. Status Reports

Oh yes, Status Reports! Who does not like them? Well, the truth of the matter is – nobody does, other than senior management. I remember when I managed projects in the corporate world, I absolutely hated putting them together. You spend hours on something that would take senior execs 1 min to read, only for them to make some stupid and unreasonable decision. Sorry, I digressed here. In any case, OneNote can become a great tool to expedite the development of those weekly Status Reports.

Evernote To Do List

9. Action Items List

Evernote To Do List Template

Action Items is another piece of content that might be perfect for OneNote. Could be great for quick To-Do Lists that do not belong in the formal task list/schedule. The checklist (To Do functionality in OneNote) is amazing!

Evernote Task List

10. Emails

Using Evernote For Project Management Tools

Did you receive an important email you want to become part of a project record? You can copy the whole email to any OneNote notebook with a click of a button.