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A new way of using OneNote to keep myself from looking silly

  • Artigo

  • As I've mentioned before, one of the techniques I employ with Outlook is a rule to delay all my outgoing mail by 2 minutes. It keeps me from sending mail too soon - for instance, if I misspell my own name and don't notice it until I press Send, I have a chance to stop the send and fix the error before anyone else can see it.

  • I'm going to take this one step further for the next few weeks. This article was in the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times, and this excerpt caught my eye:

  • " I advise my clients to take the time to write any important e-mails in a word-processing program where they will not be tempted to hit the "send" button in a fit of emotion. "

  • Pasted from <https://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008719926_skube08.html>

  • This seems like a reasonable idea to me. Since you can email OneNote pages very easily, I decided I'll start doing this myself to get better "coverage" of the area. I typically prefer shortcut keys over menus, so I'll probably make liberal use of CTRL+SHIFT+E to open an email item instead of using the menu commands.

  • There are a few options I can set for how the email item is created, too. They are in Tools | Options | Sending email:

  • They are pretty self explanatory and I will work through the different permutations over time.

  • Going with the dogfood philosophy around here, I guess I need to admit I doubt I'll find any functional bugs with this. It's a pretty stable feature and I'm not really expecting to get any errors. What I will get is a different sense of using OneNote and a different viewpoint of tying OneNote and Outlook together. One of the things I've learned is that this will have some sort of a payoff in the future - it's just really hard to predict what that payoff will be. A new point of view to inject during a design meeting, a new test case related to performance or some other change may result from this experience over the next few weeks.

  • This completely misses the point of the author, though. Her point was that by using a "formal looking" word processor, I would get my mind into a more formal communication mode. OneNote is not designed to be a rich presentation application - we're all about quickly getting information together and stored. I may still make mistakes with the formatting and miss the benefits Daneen Skube stresses. We'll see.

  • I'll keep in touch about this.

  • Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

  • John

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.clickandsolve.com/?p=6950

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2009
    I've been using your two-minute delay because several times, I have accidentally hit ctrl-enter, which in Outlook is a keystroke for "immediately send the message without any confirmation."   In other MS programs, ctrl-enter is some form of insert (in onenote it inserts a row in a table and in Word, it inserts a page break).  It is a minor defect in MS user-interface consistency. Another thing: I tried a one-minute delay and got unsatisfactory results.  Turns out it isn't a true "one-minute delay."  It is actaully a delay "until the next minute starts".  So sometimes you get a full minute, sometimes you get 5 seconds, depending on the time you sent it within that minute. The two minute delay at least always gives you one full minute before a send. Any suggestions on how to implement an occasional override to the two minute delay?  Sometimes I want to send something two weeks from now, it gets overridden by the rule.  Sometimes I want to send something without a delay at all (if I'm on the phone and want to send something as part of the discussion).

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2009
    I don't know if it was due to my efforts trying to use OneNote to create all my email, but I got this