6 tips to transform Google Notebook into OneNote or EverNote

Google Notebook was a nice service to begin with, but it lacked many features. Now that it has matured a bit, a lot of options and ways to organize and be more productive were added, making this not just a thought jotter, but a full fledged organizer. Here are a few tips helping you to turn Google Notebook into something more like OneNote or EverNote than textpad and notepad.

Create a note title

Whenever I write in my Google notebook I always create titles. There are two reasons you should start this good practice. One is obvious, when the note is (or notes are) expanded you can easily see what’s what without having to read into notes. The second reason is that when the notes are collapsed, you can also identify notes very quickly. So that your titles are identifiable in collapsed mode it is best if you add a special symbol after them.

I usually create titles in the format “text - text |”. If you create lists for separate days of the week you could create a title on the first line saying: “tuesday - shopping list”. This will be collapsed and all formatting will be removed, but due to the hyphen and the pipe after, your title will be identifiable when the note is collapsed.

Use labels for future reference

Labels were originally not part of Google Notebook, but they are very welcome now. Labels allow you to group notes that are otherwise totally unrelated. I could have a shopping list in there somewhere and I could also have a post on Hack Your Day about how to productively shop with a shopping list.

While in this particular example I may not benefit from seeing the link between these two, who knows? Perhaps while shopping I find a totally cool method which I only remember to share because I saw the link between the two.

Nevertheless, labeling can help you organize and conserve space by enabling you to reduce your notebook count. Not that you have space limitations, but the simpler your system the better. You can then go to the sort menu and sort by label, or just click on a label to list all notes that belong there.

Combine Google Bookmarks and Google Notebook

Google’s bookmark service has been fully integrated into Google Notebooks, giving you a unified way of organizing notes and bookmarks. Visiting the two services separately is still an option, but pretty pointless, since Notebook offers a much better experience. You can add bookmarks like usual, jot down your notes and so on, they will be updated in both places.

What changed though is that you now have all of Notebook’s tools to help you manage them. You (or a collaborator) can add a comment, assign a label, and this all adds to your organization and productivity, since it is integrated into your system.

Use the Firefox Browser extension

The Notebook Firefox extension is actually one of the best extensions I’ve seen, you can use it for all sorts of stuff. The main reason I suggest using it is that this is the tool that allows you to gather data like you can with Outlook and Evernote.

The extension opens a small window in your browser and allows you to paste data, or actually create and manipulate notes like you do in the full screen browser version. The windows is small, about 300×200px, but still provides a rich experience, very similar to the normal editing mode, how they managed to make this work is a mystery to me.

The browser extension also comes with a handy context menu entry enabling you to save snippets of data as you highlight it. You can right click anywhere on a page and click “note this with Google Notebook” and the small editor will autmatically open, creating a new note with the URL as the title. If you highlight any text on the page, this will automatically added to the note as well.

This will shave hours of your working time in the long run, and will probably save you some frustration as well, this is one extension I rely on heavily because often I save the stuff I want to write about like this. No need to find relevant entries in my RSS feed or bookmarks, I just open Google Notebook.

Use the drag and drop feature

If you hover your mouse over the left hand side of a note, you will see that you can drag it. You can simply take a note and drag it into a different notebook. This is a great feature if you want to keep a record of things to do and things done. Just drag the note to the relevant Notebook.

You could also use this for task management. Just create a task list and Notebooks for phases of a project. When a task enters a new phase just drag and drop it. There are many other ways you can use this feature, it will keep you productive by taking clicks and checkboxes away from the equation and letting you simple rearrange your thoughts.

Make full use of the comments option

Remember that you can use comments for youself, this isn’t just for other users to share their thoughts on your notes. I use a comment box like the “add a note” feature when creating bookmarks. For example when creating a task I would try to be as brief as possible and then add things to do with it in comments.

You can also add notes like “waiting for input” in the comments, or you could add ingredients to a recipe you still need to buy. The uses are again endless, and can contribute a lot to your productivity.

Since the comments section gets condensed as you collapse the notes, it is also good practice to keep your comments short and well organized too, this will enable you to make the most info out without needing to open anything.