If a business leader wants to remain relevant in today’s dynamic marketplace they must always be learning. One of the best ways to learn and increase your knowledge is by reading.
Active reading, where you highlight important information and take notes on what is being read, is even one step better! Putting the highlighted passages and notes into a format that can be shared with others or reviewed at another time kicks learning up to a whole new level!
I have always been a voracious reader but I lacked the discipline required to go back to the books and pull out the highlights and notes. Because of that lack of discipline, I often spent many unnecessary hours searching through volumes of books for something I had read that I needed for my business.
Then Amazon changed everything . . .
– this is perhaps the best and most powerful productivity app that I use. OneNote started off as a PC based program that Microsoft sold that allowed the user to take notes and organize them in any way they desired. This includes graphics, pictures, sound bytes, emails, webpages, screen captures, etc.) The goal of OneNote is to replace your handwritten notebooks. It was turned into an app a number of years ago and I have the app installed on my iPad and my iPhone. The data is synched through the cloud so each device is always up to date. I have not used a paper based notebook since I installed the OneNote program on my laptop back in about 2005. OneNote allows you to take and file all your notes electronically so you can search on keywords and find all the notes you ever took on that subject. Comparing paper based notebooks to OneNote is like comparing a rubber raft to a nuclear powered aircraft carrier! Watch for a future post on how I organize my OneNote.