Earlier I described my current system for handling WORK and Personal stuff in OneNote:
...my flow
capture --> Log-Raw (the default) and/or Log-Raw-work (which I have to specify manually)
process Log-Raw to split up into Log - Personal and LOG-WORK
possibly merging Log-Raw-work into Log-Raw just before processing/sorting/splitting
and thereafter moving stuff into GTD notebooks and lists, etc.
Recently I quit my old job. I'm now taking a break for a few weeks, before starting my new job.
I admit that I had fallen behind in my weekly reviews and cleanups. I had quite a few items in my Log-Raw that I had not classified as WORK or Personal. But now that I was leaving my old job, I had to clean this up ASAP.
Here's what I did - what worked well, and what did not work:
GREAT: I wrote some AutoHotkey code so that I can quickly classify all of the items in a OneNote section. One key press to mark an item as #WORK or #PERSONAL, and then move on to the next item. Plus a few other keypresses to indicate #PRIVATE (needs to be encrypted), and #INVENTION? (to indicate to my old company that there might be something worth patenting). This worked greated. I processed upwards of 5,000 pages in just a few hours.
(I have used this technique, creating single key classification or triage macros, many times before.)
GOOD: I chose to indicate the classification by #HASHTAGS: placing #WORK, #PERSONAL, etc., as prefixes in the page titles. Marking this way was simple, easy, quick and dirty, although the page titles became uselessly long. In the future, I may choose to put the #HASHTAGS in a metadata section - the first paragraph of the page.
IMPORTANT: it is important to have a complete partition: #WORK vs #PERSONAL. It is bad to mark only #WORK, and assume that an unmarked page is personal by default. There needs to be a way of distinguihing pages that have been processed from pages that have not been processed.
BAD: I tried, but abandoned, using OneNote's built-in tags to do this classification marking. They simply are too limited.
BAD: unfortunately, OneNote/OneTastic macros cannot move pages between sections or notebooks.
UNFORTUNATE: adding the #WORK, etc., classification tags changed the modified date of the pages. Loss of information. Next time I may try to save/restore the modied date.
OKAY WORKAROUND: I worked around this limitation by sorting the pages within a section by their page names - which were prefixed #WORK, #PERSONAL, etc. Once sorted, I took all of the #WORK pages, and moved them into their own LOG-WORK notebopok, etc.
BAD: well, that was the theory... and eventually I acheived it. But I found that OneNote is really, Really, REALLY slow moving and copying pages around. Like, an hour to copy 500 pages around. Worse, it repeatedly crashed.
The progress bar semed to quickl;y get to 50%, and then stop. I conjectured that the problem might have been that I have too many links - but I removed all links (via a scanning macro), no joy. I conjecture still that the problem might be that I have embedded a LOT of PDFs and PPTs in my OneNote pages. The overall size of my WORK pages was circa 900MB. My personal stuff is several times that in size.
Eventually I got the pages separated.
GOOD: more OneTastic code to remove the tags like #WORK from the page titles, not that they are in separate folders.
BAD: the repeated crashes and other problems resulted in page duplicates.
GOOD: So I wrote code to dedup the pages.
Overall, my AHK and OneTastic macros worked great. But
OneNote's extreme slowness copying and moving pages around was
really, Really, REALLY bad. And may be a reason to abandon OneNote.
