Bryan is a minimalist (well, that is if you ignore his myriad of high-tech photographic equipment, gadget packed bikes, stacks of computers, and on and on). He was telling me yesterday that when it comes to saving tidbits on his computer he launches Word–but all the straight-jacket formatting is too confining. So I asked him about OneNote. “It’s too young of a product,” he claimed.
However, after a dozen minutes of walking through how he uses Word, it became clear–at least to me–that he should be using OneNote as his primary minimalist tool. Here’s why:
* It’s less cognitive load in many areas. You cut and paste things you want to save to OneNote and you don’t have to worry about saving your work. It just does it. One less thing to worry about.
* No “all-in-one column” thinking. You just click where you want to type (or handwrite if you want) and author away.
* You can organize your random thoughts and notes into folders. And by keeping them all in one app, you can stay a true minimalist.
But Bryan has one feature in Word he can’t live without: Tables for printing labels. It seems on top of everything else, from time to time he wants to print labels. And no, he doesn’t want to use any extra programs to do it. He just wants to print them. So in Word he’s set up some templates to print the labels. And since Word is the best program he has for printing the labels, he’s going to stick with Word for his notes.
This got me thinking. How many apps do I use on a daily basis? Not very many. In fact, for any given week I bet I only use three or four. If my work needs me to focus heavily on one app, for instance, I think it steals time from another. So in effect, I only use a few apps at a time.
Bryan, because of his label printing need, needs to use Word, so that knocks off OneNote because it would be one more thing for him to learn and use daily. It’s interesting, since I use the Tablet PC a lot, OneNote is crucial for taking notes, saving parts of webpages, and saving just about every tidbit of info I want to keep around. It’s become my center repository for many things. As a result, I’ve found myself using Word and Notepad less and less. When one tool works well, other tools start gathering dust.
I hadn’t realized until yesterday, that I try to minimize all the apps I use too. I guess the theory of having lots of little apps that do little things wouldn’t work well for me. Hmm. I wonder if this is universal?