OneNote for Journaling

As covered in On Journaling, we here at Retired Thinker are of the opinion that all intellectually active folks (retired or not) should keep a journal. I happen to use Microsoft’s OneNote for my journaling needs.

I come from a science background, so I started journaling during the research phase of my time in graduate school. I didn’t think of it as keeping a journal per se; I was keeping a laboratory notebook or logbook, which is just something that researchers do. But my logbook served the same function as a journal - I used it every day to record progress, work out issues, jot down ideas, make TODO lists, record things for future reference, etc. To this day I treat my journal more like a laboratory notebook and less like a diary, but hey journal in whatever way suits you.

My early logbooks were, of course, old-school paper and I wrote in them with an old-school pen. I would print out plots generated on an old-school computer (remember VAX?), crop them with scissors, and tape them in. I’d fill up a lab notebook every few months. I still have these lab notebooks on my bookshelf, it really takes me back to look through them. When I first left the world of science for a software development job, I continued to carry around and use a physical logbook, because that was just how I rolled. I remember getting some funny looks from coworkers who saw me doing this, so I soon switched to journaling on a computer. For many years I just used Microsoft Word for journaling, but eventually I switched over to using OneNote, which is much better suited to the task.

Obtaining OneNote

Unfortunately, I think Microsoft has done a poor job of evolving OneNote over the years. This page attempts to explain how OneNote got to where it is now. There is a free standalone version of OneNote available via the Microsoft Store here, and OneNote is included in Microsoft 365, which is the version that I use. Installing and getting up and running with OneNote from Microsoft 365 is very straightforward.

Organization within OneNote

The organizational structure that OneNote provides out of the box is a hierarchy:

• Notebooks
  • Sections
    • Pages
      • Sub-Pages

Each Notebook can contain several sections, which appear as tabs. Each Section can contain several pages, which hold the actual content. Each Page has a title that shows up in a table of contents window. In the table of contents, pages can appear to have Sub-Pages. These are really just pages too, but pages can be moved to different levels in the table of contents to form whatever hierarchy you like.

Beyond that, how you organize is up to you. I would caution against spending too much time up front to come up with the perfect organization for your journal, as OneNote makes it easy to rearrange content when you decide to reorganize. I’ve done it several times.

My current organizational system works well for me, so I will expound on it a bit. The system actually has a name: PARA. You can find many pages and videos online (e.g. here and here) that cover it. In a nutshell, PARA is an acronym for top-level organizational categories which turn into sections (tabs) in OneNote:

Projects: where you put information for your current projects, topics, or concerns. Each project gets a page and perhaps some sub-pages. The software project(s) that I am working on at the moment get pages. I also have ‘real life’ projects or pursuits that get pages, e.g. Plan Next Vacation, Shop for New Car. Projects in the PARA system can be just about anything, but a Project should have a finite lifespan.

Areas: For ongoing concerns that don’t have an end date. E.g. Finances and Home Maintenance might have separate pages under the Areas tab. I also have Area pages for my long-term hobbies, e.g. Music.

Resources: A place to put reference materials, documents, and links that might be useful in the future. I personally don’t use this section very much, I tend to embed those resources within my Project pages.

Archives: When Projects are finished, they move to Archives, where future-you might want to refer back to them someday. In OneNote archiving a Project means just dragging and dropping the page from the Projects section to the Areas section instead.

I have augmented the PARA scheme with one more section that I use for general journal entries that don’t pertain to any particular project or area. A PARA purist would probably say that my day-to-day journaling should be in a page under Areas, but I find it more convenient to have it in a separate top-level section that I just label by year.

Cross-Platform Fun(ctionality)

As explained in Living in Two Ecosystems, I currently use both Windows and Apple products on a daily basis, so for me the cross platform functionality of Microsoft 365 OneNote is a killer feature. OneNote can be installed and running simultaneously on my Windows PCs, Macs, iPads, and iPhone. It can also be accessed through any web browser, but I never use this. Changes made to OneNote pages on one machine show up within seconds on all other running instances of OneNote on all machines. I use this constantly to get a URL, document, chunk of code, or paragraph of text quickly transported from one world into the other. Having full access to my Second Brain from my iPhone while AFK has come in handy at times too. There are a few annoying differences between the Windows and Mac versions of OneNote, e.g. the key combination to insert the current time and date into the text is Alt-Shift-F on Windows but is Cmd-Shift-D on MacOS. But generally the experience of using OneNote is similar enough across the different platforms.

The impressive cross-platform abilities of OneNote come at a cost though: you have to give up some control of your data and trust in the security of the cloud. OneNote stores your data in some unspecified way (actually via OneDrive) in the cloud to pull off this cross-platform magic. I never quite got comfortable storing my most important and private data in the cloud, even as a backup. I try very hard to make sure it exists only on my local hard drives, and I take responsibility for backing up said data. I am careful never to put account information and other sensitive data into OneNote, because of my concerns regarding cloud security. You can protect pages or sections within OneNote with additional passwords, but I don’t know how much extra security that really provides.

I read that OneNote can still be configured to only save locally to your hard drive (like it did in the old days), so that your data never leaves your machine, but of course that means giving up the cross-platform functionality. For me, the cross-platform features are worth the loss of privacy.

Another legitimate concern about data stored in the cloud: what if Microsoft just loses it? These things happen. OneNote has a mechanism to automatically create backups of your OneNote content to your local hard drive periodically, for safe keeping. I turn that on.

Pen support

Another feature of OneNote that I’d like to highlight is its support for pen input. As will be detailed in a future post, OneNote running on my iPad has out-of-the-box support for writing ink with the Apple Pencil. Ink input lives happily alongside any other content in any OneNote page. While I use a keyboard to work within OneNote the vast majority of the time, I use an iPad and Apple Pencil to work math and physics ‘homework’ problems for my learning endeavors, as somewhat of a throwback to my college days of working problem sets with pencil and paper. Although support for the Apple Pencil on iPads in OneNote could be better, as some advanced capabilities are not supported, it is still quite usable. I have tried tools like Goodnotes and Notability, which have better support for iPads and the Apple Pencil. However, I didn’t find them to be enough of an improvement over OneNote to justify their cost. Plus, using different software for pen input would be less convenient than just staying within OneNote. I have an active Project going now to explore ways to improve my ‘homework problem sets’ inking experience, so I might change my opinion on this in the future. Also, I would expect the ink features in OneNote to work better on a Windows device like a Microsoft Surface Pro with a pen. If I could get my hands on one of those machines for a good price, I’d like to explore this.

Add-ins

While Add-ins (aka plugins) exist for OneNote, so far I haven’t run across any Add-ins that I felt were compelling enough to install. Again, this may change going forward.

Other Miscellaneous Pros and Cons

Pros:

• OneNote provides a convenient way to handle TODOs with checkboxes that can be checkmarked when the TODO is completed. The search function allows you to easily see a list of all unchecked TODOs.
• OneNote automatically includes the URL when pasting a section copied from a web page.
• OneNote does not have a Save function, it just automatically constantly saves everything you do as you do it. I might consider this automatic saving feature to be too presumptive in other software packages, but it works great for journaling in OneNote. I still find myself pressing Ctrl-S to save in OneNote just out of habit though. Fortunately that key combination is not bound to anything that does any damage…

Cons:

• OneNote does not handle inter-application copy and pasting very well. Text copied from OneNote can appear as an image when pasted into certain other apps. A workaround is to paste into an app like VSCode first, which correctly interprets the paste as text, then copy and paste from VSCode to the intended target.
• I am a big fan of AI generally, but the AI functionality provided within OneNote (or other Microsoft 365 apps) via Copilot is not very well excecuted in my opinion. A recent update to OneNote makes the Copilot icon display right next to the cursor on your pages, which is intrusive and apparently cannot be disabled. The built-in Copilot AI does not provide sensible results as effectively as other AI apps/models that I’ve used. Note that the Github Copilot accessible via VSCode is different and seems much smarter.
• Some features that are available in OneNote on Windows are not available in OneNote for MacOS. One that hurts me is that the Ink-to-Math feature available in Windows does not exist in the MacOS version. One that doesn’t hurt me is that Copilot functionality is disabled in the MacOS version (for me at least - perhaps because I don’t own the ‘Work’ version of OneNote? As already mentioned, Microsoft has sometimes made obtaining/owning OneNote more confusing that it needs to be…).

Summary

If cross-platform operation is important to you, and you are willing to put aside some privacy concerns to get it, OneNote makes a great choice for journaling. It is also a convenient choice if you already own it via a subscription to Microsoft 365. But regardless of which tool you use to do it, the important thing is to start journalling.