OneNote as a Second Brain (What You're Missing)

it's like your little personal internet yeah exactly this is a photograph of a printed piece of paper that I captured in one note the handwriting on the paper is now searchable I can actually copy the text out of that picture so cool youve basically just folded the keyboard under the tablet and are now just rating on it when I type on a keyboard the only part of my brain that's active is the audio part but when I draw the whole brain's active I honestly didn't expect to be to be so impressed that's where the magic

lives [Music] hey everyone Thiago here I am so excited today to introduce someone that I've been looking forward to having on the channel for a long time I am welcoming Matthew Gilbertson to the channel who is a Microsoft software expert a Microsoft MVP in fact welcome thanks for having me and uh you know it's been I've followed you for a long time on social media so really to connect in person is fantastic thanks for the so my background is in construction I left high school and and went into the Building Trades and ended up with

a few different trades carpentry is my primary trade and I always ask this question can you see a future where you'll be using technology less no one says yes no unless they need retirement and they go yes I can't wait to get rid of it but that that's the case for all Industries my di was full of drawings it had extra pages slotted into it where I needed more space and my whole life was in that diary I had a problem and when I moved into managing building and projects was how do I take my

thinking and digitize it because my thinking was in paper I'd tried pdas and laptops I'd tried all those types of things couldn't get the result I was after but the digital piece of paper that one note gave me solved an amazing amount of problems in fact it took over the course of a few months I was saving between 20 and 30 hours a week out of my workflow because I could do things on the spot wherever I happened to be no duplication of effort anymore unexpected or added benefit to that was I essentially built a

second brain without the terminology being invented yet cuz you weren't there to help me uh and that was that I had this uh history of information there that I could search yeah so I found then that people started asking me more about what I was doing rather than what they wanted to be built for them my brother and I started this business called tablet PC which was talking to people about using tablet based technology okay we learned pretty early on that even though people would see what we were doing with devices and buy the devices

but they wouldn't change the way they worked and so those devices went unutilized and then we leared that if we trained them we would get not only better results for them but people would buy more devices you know selling 10 or 15 or 100 devices was a pretty good uh margin oh W but we leared that if we wanted to up those sales we had to invest some of that back in training people because it was people that used the technology that sold the technology not the features and the benefits right it was actually the

Practical benefit and they were helping people think about technology differently we've worked with Microsoft very closely to talk about the benefits of using what we call multimodal Computing multimodal means more than the keyboard so I use a keyboard every day but I also use my digital pen every day I also use the microphones and speakers every day on my device touch as well and then now multimo also means AI as well right so assistance in what I'm doing for and looking the power of search and all of those sorts of things well my modern job

designation is productivity specialist okay my day-to-day job is about adopting technology helping people adopt technology for their human benefit I want to speak to all of you out there who maybe have been following me or another content creator or thought leader maybe have heard about second brains or personal Knowledge Management or digital gardening or whatever it is and you are in an organization or a company or something that uses only Microsoft products and you have to use Microsoft products I myself don't know much about the Microsoft ecosystem which is why I ask you to come

in what would be sort of the entry point for someone like that they probably use technology dayto day maybe they don't know it's kind of how to access its full potential but what does it mean or how would you get started let's say creating your second brain in one note so the the first place I would start is just to understand that if you log into office.com on the web with your subscription if that's personal or a corporate subscription look at the number of tools that you've got access to here wow really so you know

most people think of office as word excel Outlook maybe PowerPoint right but it's massive there are so many Tools in there to get your head around and think about using it's not the office that most people are familiar with which is probably 20 or 30 years old right there's a bunch of tools so from a building a second brain perspective understanding that Outlook and one note are integrated with to-do uh also with planner and now with Microsoft Loop and other things as well SharePoint teams it keeps going and going so probably one of the benefits

from a corporate perspective and that's why most businesses have the Microsoft ecosystem is you get a full site of products that can interact with each other yeah are these all included in a Microsoft 365 subscription so I personally have two subscriptions I have my work subscription but I also have a family subscription because for in Australian terms for about $120 a year I get 5 terab of storage for my family I get access to Shared calendars out one note Etc so even at a family level right having the team or my family in one ecosystem

of for example this trip we've been I've been here for a month in the US on holiday um taking photos all those photos from my camera get loaded up into our one Drive account for curation later totally everyone's photos going to the same one Drive account getting photos from family members and friends is an absolute nightmare so I see the appeal yeah so rather than posting all into WhatsApp or Viber or something like that they're just going straight into one drive and we have access to them we see a lot of people still concerned about

cloud storage um if you really want to you can get it off and put it in a local storage I'd say leave it in the cloud if it was up to me but totally and I'm noticing is this just productivity apps so explore by category is something you have on this page right so you know what utilities do we have you can go through this homepage there's a we could spend a whole day talking about the homepage but the key message I wanted to give you here is that there is a bunch of apps that

talk to each other and Microsoft is continuing to do work in making that more and more seamless I often say say even using third party apps that your second brain is not one app it's a whole ecosystem of apps but I I do also say your digital Notes app is sort of the nerve center yes one note is the nerve center for that because it gives me the ability to capture and create in any format that I want when we think about capturing in the moment I don't want to think about modality but I also

don't want to think about how do I create my notes I just want to create them in whatever is available to me right now that might be writing it might be typing it might be voice it might be capture but I need to be able to capture in the moment yeah with as little friction as possible yeah so let's dive into one note what do multimodal capture that you're talking about look like within one note if I can just divert a little bit to start with and talk about structure because I'm using an older structure

of one note here that most people who are introduced to it for the first time don't know so Under The View tab in one note we actually have the ability to change the layout of tabs so uh my layout here is pages on the right sections across the top and notebooks down the left so notebooks are the top hierarchy and you can see here as I scroll through this I've got a lot of notebooks open and that's because I've got almost 20 years worth of notes Here open today I create a notebook for every major

topic so if we're thinking about the par method I would definitely have Project based notebooks area based notebooks research notebooks right and then my Archive of notebooks I probably don't use notebooks are essentially folders yes and the the metaphor here is kind of like your like your notebook like in school in binders that is now digital you're kind of using some of that terminology right yes so a notebook is a folder but unlike some other apps for example ever Noe is what I'm thinking of you can subdivide and structure within a notebook is that right

and there's a lot of levels of structure there that perhaps you're not aware of or people aren't aware of so I do have the basic level which is section dividers so think of those like a colored divider and they are divided here right you can see the the colors I've got here and to add a new section I just hit the plus symbol here new sections created and I can give it a name and way I go I've got another divider you'll notice here that over on the right now I don't have any information because

I have no pages in this section it comes with its own blank page which has a title block at the top which tells me time and date created one notes tracking time and date it's tracking changes automatically there's no save button in one note everything's automatically saved you don't have to think about that great and it also tracks author so notebook section page pages are kind of the three main and I can have groups of sections and I can also have sub pages and sub pages of sub Pages three page levels all right two section

levels and then your notebook level okay so that's six levels of hierarchy this is currently a working my presentation content so anything I present is probably in this folder I do a lot of presentations out of one note instead of PowerPoint I do present in PowerPoint but I love the free form nature of what I have in one note and I can give you an example of that here if I zoom out here you will see that I've got a bunch of images here and content on this page that I just float around wherever my

presentation takes me to so one of the first benefits you'll see here in a one note page is it's a limitless canvas I don't have size restrictions this page can be as large as I want it to be and you'll also see here that I have different sorts of content I have captured content from images I have inking and I have text on the same page I don't carry a mouse with me when I travel uh I tend to use the trackpad and the keyboard but most time if I'm thinking about something um I'll go

keyboard behind my device or off and I'll go to the pen and start thinking and annotating um and using that as my mouse and my pen as my mouse instead of my finger in fact The Leverage the pen gives me is actually much faster than even touch when I type on a keyboard the only part of my brain that's active is the audio part but when I draw um the whole brain's active everyone's a visual learner even people that can't see are visual Learners really it's the visual part of the brain that is in involved

in learning so I'm going to use search as an example of this so Global search in one note on the right hand side here I have a search box I'm going to just search for the word anything inside 20 years worth of notes and you can see already has a list of notes populating here right so that's pretty chaotic I would be more specific if I really knew what I was looking for but I just want to use this as an example to show you the power of ink in one note in particular and here

is a note right now the quality of my handwriting is questionable at best yeah anything is searchable now did I write everything or anything there I can't even tell M but it's found it this is OCR yeah optical character recognition one note does this um anywhere right so even if I had an image of photograph of handwriting so if you don't have a a pan enabled Windows device um you can get one note on your phones right and on your iPads and other things as well the functionality is not the same on those but it's

still the same app so for example um I might be on a on a Mac for example and I don't have access to writing through the screen but I could capture handwritten information from my paper based diary into a one note page and that would become searchable so what do you do take a picture with your phone take picture with your phone straight into one note in fact one note on your phone will have a camera built into it so you can photograph it straight into one note and then it inserts that let's say it'll

be an image I'll give you an example that right here now right so here's another one before I do I just want to show you that that that under the draw tab I actually can uh convert that Windows learns your handwriting style it's learned mine right I write in a lot of different applications to text on occasion depending on the circumstance okay so it learns from you every time you use it so that ability to take notes and convert them without reworking them one of the things I find that really helpful for actually is if

I was um wanting to I had a thought or a group of thoughts in my head and I wanted to organize them I would always write or Draw the scenario out rather than type it and what I find that helps me to do is it helps me to really process the thinking at a very deep level it fores me to work it feels hard because it is you're actually asking the brain to work hard yeah but once I've written that out it's normally pretty good content and so I want to curate that content I would

convert a copy of it I would keep a copy of my handwritten notes and I would put them up side by side interesting and I would look at my handwritten notes versus the conversion and I would then curate and edit in type text of course can you also just draw directly in this note on on your on your surface so we can we can draw right or write if I was going to write I would I would always go on the table and go back into a writing posture and yeah and keep annotating and drawing

we have some pretty cool things from a drawing perspective here all right so the ability to you know quickly draw shapes um and get them to to come up and straight lines if you were you know a lot of flowcharter type person we want to do this sort of thing and get ideas linked together building a very informal mind map you can do that here as well as just a general ink and and drawing oh so shapes and lines it recognizes what you're you're trying to do and it turns it into a a neater version

if you want that to be turned on you can in fact the way to do that is just simply just to hold your pen at the end of the shape and it will it will formalize it for you I see I see you've basically just folded the keyboard under the tablet and are now just writing on it is this your default like you're you're at a lecture or a class and you're taking notes absolutely in fact we have a rule internally and in the organizations I visit that if I'm in a meeting with another person

screens down no no screen between menu we've all been in the meeting room where there's 15 people typing on keyboards clattering away and yet you know are they it's awful it's terrible whereas here we actually have transparency and Trust in the conversation now right um we've done some work recently with some social workers um you know government agency workers who who deal with social work and the ability for them to take notes in front of for example if I was just even to take the keyboard off but you know I'm I'm meeting you you're in

need of help and that's a pretty horrible situation for everyone to be in but from a personto person experience here I am asking you questions and I'm taking notes right while I'm looking at you and engaged like this is a very huge Human Experience this is not think about this in a meeting room and people report to us all the time wow look at the change in the demeanor of our meetings even the posture if I was sitting at a table I'd be leaning over the top of this leaning forward on a keyboard I'm rocked

back that human connection we have the ability to affect that too with tools like this less than 20% of the workforce in my experience can actually type faster than they can handw write really yeah so there's a good few people that have learned to touch Tope and can do it really fast and quickly but even those people if they're thinking about what they're typing the natural speed of their typing will slow back to close to handw running speed interesting uh gun touch typists or the best touch typists are not thinking about content they're duplicating it

yeah you know there's a a medium we haven't spoken about here and that's the voice Medium as well it's another human thing and I'm going to give you an example of this I'm going to jump back to the notes I collected before in preparation for this last night so this is an example of um the way we script out our videos so this is the topic of this uh video here and what what Brett actually did in creating this script was this is a topic that he knew really well and he used in one note

the dictate dictate function he just dictated it m straight into the page and we actually recorded that as well um so why he wanted to record it was not only are we dictating in content to be read through a script we want to give this script to another person to read the camera mhm so how can they hear the intent and the tone behind this script interesting so they can listen to the audio recording as they read the script themselves right and that helps them to get the full meaning of what they wanted to do

that voice to text capability saves duplication of effort this script goes through a review process and there's several people here and what you can actually if I zoom in here you can see that Brett Gilbertson BG put the content in here but if I go over to the side here let's Zoom around a bit I will find someone else has made contributions to this here so if we go down here Alex Davies initial so Alex has made and this is about tracking authors you can see we've got some screenshots in here plus we've now got

ink right and highlights all on the same page as we've built and reviewed this script as a group of people and then we have the ability to link this to other things as well so that's what I was going to ask you how do links work so you have you know different uh sections and pages and notebooks what if you see a you know two ideas that you want to kind of create that link between them so the simple way is to create a hyperlink between I can create a hyperlink to a notebook to a

section to a page or even to a paragraph in the page or a point in the page so I'll give you an example of that right let's just use this handwriting as an example so I'm just going to select this word right running recurring meetings I'm going to right click on it and bring up the context menu and one of the options here will be copy link to paragraph I could go anywhere else including an email or a Word document right and paste that link I'm just going to paste it into a brand new one

note page here there's the L link so every single element on every note has its own link can be can have it if you create the link you creating the link by doing this but when I click this link you can see it took me straight back to that page that's quite a more precise linking than just here's a note cuz a note could have many thousands of words so I can and we often do if I wanted to create a an index for example copy link to pages and in fact if I go back

to the research I did before the things I thought about before we came into today these are just copied links to pages so I thought hey I can quickly navigate through my 20 or 30 notebooks by just going here did you have to create that little kind of table of contents manually or will it do that for you so I I just uh was thinking last night and hopped on a teams call with my brother back in Australia and said what are the key you know if there was key examples we wanted to show where

would they be and what examples do we have already and I just put those into the page while I was talking to him so it's it's as simple as right clicking on the page going copy link to page and pasting it to whever I want it to go and if I want to edit that link I can hit here and edit link right click edit link and I can give the a link a descriptive name but the address is located here as well it's like your little personal internet yeah exactly or maybe an interet right

it's internal for my thinking but I could link external documents to these pages so a Word document or a PDF or a PowerPoint could put the hyperlink straight to this page what is the difference there between like attaching something or adding it versus linking to it so when I insert content into one note I do get the option to print things to One Note One notes in fact if you've used Microsoft Windows often times when you go to print you'll see print to one note or send to one note as a printer option right so

by default you can print anything into one note you want and what does that mean to print to one note yeah I'll give you an example of it here so here's a Word document it's a quote for a customer and I'm going to print this document file uh and print and one of the options here is print to PDF but I'm going to go print to one note I'm going to hit print I could change what pages are going to print to that document Etc one note should now come up with a dialog box and

here it is and what this is saying to me is Matt you've decided to print this document to one note but I need to know where where do you want this to go and one of the options at the top will be the current page mhm so if I was to print this on our current page and okay a digital paper print out of that document appears in this I see this most often use for example you've been emailed a meeting agenda you could actually just drag it and drop it into the onee page it

will give you the option to insert a print out yeah or to attach the document the attach documents is useless it's static yeah whereas a print out means that I can now draw all over it it's actually now um it's actually now also searchable oh oh okay so if it's attached it's not searchable or annotatable you get both of those functionalities when you when you is it print or another way of doing that um so drag and drop drag and drop the file into the one note page or print and if you're in Outlook there's

actually a send to one night button in the classic Outlook I should say not the modern Outlook it's a different meth methodology there but let's say I've got an email from you and I've got a section on building second brain and I want to put that email straight into that section I just go send a one note and it prints that email into that one note section I will just quickly show you that these are searchable let's just uh give this a bit of a test by going to Windows and I just search for the

word windows and you can see the yellow highlights already this is a photograph of a printed piece of paper that I captured in one note the handwriting on the paper is now searchable in one note so cool not only is it searchable as would be the text I can actually copy the text out of that picture now I could go back we had a Word document open here before let's just do this just go uh file new blank document and I am going to split screen this so you can see what I'm doing but I'm

just going to paste all of that content straight into word interesting now it's even actually had to go with the handwriting would need some curation yeah but think about the effort I've saved so much so people have I met people that have shelves full of their old paper based notes yeah and maybe by year or by diary or by topic yeah so if I could photograph those into a medium that let me extract them as text like what could I do with that information being able to embrace those multiple modes right and get them into

or you know push them forward is the way I think of it push them forward into digital mediums it's really powerful I want to ask you about kind of the uh The Cutting Edge new kit on the Block in the Microsoft ecosystem which is Loop have you used Loop are you familiar with it how does it kind of fit into things a lot of people compare loop with one note and um just just now available in one note is Loop components inside of one note M and so perhaps you have to understand what Loop components

are and so they're portable bits of content M so what I've got here is a let me just pick one that's here we go here's an AI marketing plan right I'm not sure whether I should be sharing this or not but we'll give it so this component right is a table of people shared with a bunch of others that is real time collaborative so we can all edit this at the same time it's currently in the loop desktop app that you're seeing but I can make this available to you in Outlook in an email I

could make it available I could paste it into a OneNote page and so this same component which is live is available in multiple applications at the same time What I Hear and what you're saying is one of my favorite Concepts which is reusability often you have these I it's it's funny because there's not an agreed upon term artifact module you know uh intermediate packet is my term that I made up um but it's it's like often you you realize wait a minute I'm not accessing my notes equally there's a relatively small number that are these

cornerstones that we're always going back to the list of goals you know the schedule for the year the marketing plan and it's almost like if I understood correctly tell me if I'm right Loop is doubling down on that and saying let's make those frequently accessed modules super sharable not just person to person but across different apps is that kind of right exactly right I am in one not here again but even uh keyboard shortcuts like I might be building a bullet list well if I go control dot there's a bullet list if I was to

go to control slash there's a numbered list so at the first point I might start this here and then I realize well this this is more important and it needs to be with more people so maybe that's when I going to turn that into a loop component or you may have started in Loop because you know you want to share that across applications and across people could you show us an example of that where you realize oh this casual note that I'm taking I actually want to bring it into Loop I'm just going to copy

that whole uh screenshot well that that box there and let's just copy it and let's just go to Loop and let's go back to ideas let's create a page I paste it here what it looks like to bring that into Outlook or teams or somewhere else let's go to teams yeah so here is our teams chat and on Co Microsoft copilot program and you can see that I've got that same table I showed you in Loop right right here inside the conversation editable the same as it was in the application and everyone who's in this

on this team can go in and edit that yeah there's something too almost like psychological notes are so private I wonder if you ever feel even though you know okay I'm only sharing this one notebook they don't have access to my other notebooks there's something almost a little scary about sharing your personal notes in a form like this so this all kind of makes it like it separates maybe you could have more official documents or more public documents in Loop and more private ones in one note is that one possibility and this probably comes back

to the topic of collaboration that that we we started off with right so what is a shared note and what is actually collaboration I hear people all the time going we need more collaboration or we need better collaboration well I always like to ask what do you mean by that like because what do they say well I go well simple well they don't know actually I don't think is is this simple no one's actually asked the question or they haven't really thought about it what they know is that the transfer of information is not working

that's what they know that they're struggling with the weight of inbound communication and curating that they're struggling to find time to think in the course of their work because they are just constantly bombarded with inbound communication that forces them to task switch so I think it's good to ask the question what does it actually mean what I think it actually means what people are actually asking for is for a better exchange of ideas not documents MH and it sort of reminds me of some research that we have on fire by Professor Gordon Sanson so he's

retired but he was a biologist but he's pretty much the author of cognitive load theory he worked out that when he shared documents with colleagues all he got back was format grammar and spelling now engaged with the idea yes I noticed this too yeah whereas if he shared with them a free form idea no one cared about spelling and grammar and they engag with the idea and the concept so he came up with this Theory where he talked about version one and version two thinking and I think from our research and conversations that this is

essential to human creativity and well people say they're not creative well I challenge that everyone's creative if you can ask a question you're a creative person so the stages of answering or human creativity answering questions solving things is version one low formality thinking followed by version two right which is the format and the grammar and the spelling and the structure around it I love this this is putting terms to things that I've noticed for so long yeah and that was an eye opener for me too so when I first I mean I sort of instinctively

Built My workflow coming from building into this text space around this methodology and then I was introduced to a lecture by uh Travis Smith who works for Microsoft in Australia who was a a former School principal and he talked about this research and he put all this research on the board in this conversation with us and it was like just the most mind-blowing experience cuz everything i' felt now had the back the backstory and the reasons behind it right I knew I needed to solve things by visual processing and then I could document them I

didn't understand why until this went through you know this is what I think the shared power of less formal notes yes becomes really important because if I can see your ideas I get the chance to learn from them and importantly to influence them yeah but if I only ever interact with your 40 page Word document while I'm going to care about his spelling and grammar and format and that picture is better than this one it's too far along it's too developed too perfect in a way so in education sense chalk and talk right the importance

of free form thinking the importance of shared visualization that's that's the that's where the magic lives it's something I noticed too in the whole online you know second brain content space most systems that I see my my almost all the systems I see like like of you know demonstrations my in my initial reaction is this is too formal it's too structured it's too polished it looks nice to me notes shouldn't look too nice I can't make my notes look nice but yeah that I agree with you absolutely agree and you know I have people talking

to me about mind mapping for example right they're passionate about mind mapping and they go I want a better mindmapping app as soon as you say the word app and mindmapping I think you you've progressed too far just get a scrap of paper out and draw it or get a whiteboard and drawing it or if you've got a tool like one note just get it out and draw oh but my medic my drawing is not good and my writing is messy so what people aren't going to care they're going to engage with your ideas and

when we share collaboration on the workspace I think we we need more time to just ideate together and we don't take enough of it we're too busy to do it and the tools that we are given by default Force us into a formal approach yes left hand Justified line by line that's not the way the brain works I don't think anyway it's such a powerful point so in a way Microsoft in one know is saying okay well we need to use technology for our work but let's instead of fighting the free form informal really kind

of nature of not taking it's always been that way it's always been improvisational spontaneous in the moment it's always been physical it's always been tangible visual all these things it's just saying let's adapt to that reality and just make it easy as you demonstrated half a dozen different ways to just get that content right as it is into digital form and we haven't talked about web capture we haven't talked about a range of other things but you've just uh perfectly uh spoken what Chris prattle and and Steve sonoski did when they created one note so

they're the the one note fathers if you like okay uh and Chris prattle his car has the number plate one note on it so I saw that recently when I was in Redmond but they you know Chrisley went to Steve soski and said I need a solution things that aren't yet documents I have these things that are ideas or Bits of Paper or sticky notes and I need I need somewhere digital for them or to place them before they become more formal and that's where one note came from so I see it as a stepping

stone tool it gets my ideas into a digital format in whatever mode I have available to me hopefully a human Centric one like voice or Inc uh and then I can progress them without you know reusability is what you said right I can reuse them help them grow without yeah reiterate them without without the rework that was a mic drop moment I think we should end right there um thank you Matthew for for being here this was eye opening I honestly didn't expect to be to be so impressed and and kind of ODed by what

the Microsoft ecosystem is capable of I'm kind of thinking maybe we should explore this for our team we could use some of these you know collaboration and sharing features so happy to help you absolutely thanks so much for having me here this is an incredible experience to meet you in person and and to talk about something that's been passionate for me for more than 15 years and to see what you're doing with it is is just phenomenal thank you absolutely and where can people follow you if they want to hear more from you yeah so

we do have a YouTube channel which is ozed tablet PC or Oz tablet PC follow me on Twitter uh or or on our YouTube channel and we work with people directly as well to help in this so happy to answer questions it's what we're here it's just to help people create ideas amazing thank you thank you