As I promised earlier in my post on “Bending OneNote and Outlook to Fit my GTD System“, here are the setup details for OneNote 2007 along with some screen shots. For each of the screen shots, you can click on the image to open it full-size.

The options panel is accessed from the “Tools” menu in OneNote. The options are divided up into several Categories. I’ll walk through the changes that are important for my setup, and you may find other areas that you will want to tweak as well. Experimentation is usually better than the help menu when it comes to figuring out what some of these settings do.

On the Display tab, I prefer to have the page tabs and navigation tabs appear on the left. I also like the note containers visible since it makes it easier to see when you’ve accidentally split a note, or when you’re trying to grab text to copy or move it.

On the Save tab, the main thing you want to change is the location of the Unfiled notes section. Get rid of the separate section and have it point directly at your “@DOING” section. This will also give you another quick way to jump to your @DOING section by clicking on the Unfiled notes button.

On the Outlook Integration tab, change all of these to send data directly to your “@DOING” section.

In a continued effort to eradicate the Unfiled notes section, change all web notes and printouts to go to your @DOING section. Once this is done, you can pretty much delete the Unfiled notes file from your “My Documents\OneNote Notebooks\” folder. Of course, be sure to move any pages out of there before you delete the file.


Finally, make sure the icon is enabled (otherwise you won’t be able to use your shortcut keys), and also disable the screen clipping notifications. The less distractions the better, although there is still some level of notification even with this box checked.

That’s pretty much it. The rest of the set-up details can be found in the original post. Enjoy.