I have been thinking about - actually set up, but I thought that I would ask this forum if anyone has tried anything similar, pros/cons - creating different OneNote tags for each of the GTD Next Action contexts, and tagging sentences / paragraphs describing the next action with the corresponding context tag. And then using "Find Tags", much as @SteveTruesdale describes.
Has anyone tried this?
Thoughts:
a) the keyboard shortcuts for OneNote tags are suboptimal - ctl-1, ctl-2, etc. Wouldn't be so bad except that if you create a new tag the shortcuts all get changed, ctl-1 gets assigned to the new tag, etc. You can fix up, but its a pain. There appears to be no way to set the tags via a keyboard shortcut except using these - no menu navigation.
Q: does anyone know if there is any other keyboard driven way to set these tags, except the poorly designed ctl-1, ctl-2 ... shortcuts?
b) If I want to use a different tag for each Next Action list, I pretty much have to give up on the checkboxes. Or, rather, on having the symbol identify the tag. There *are* more than 10 OneNote checkbox tags - 3 colors (blue, yellow, green) X (no-symbol, star, !, arrow, 1, 2, 3, person, flag) --- but they have little mnemonic value. I think it will be better to create a separate tag for each GTD context, and then remove the tag when done.
c) OR... I could just use the same checkbox for all contexts, but create 10 or so differently named tags sharing the same symbol. Little mnemonic value.
d) "Find Tags" allows searching various scopes - page group, section, section group, current notebook, all notebooks, date ranges (today, yesterday, this week, last week, older)
Unfortunately, what I really want is "Search all notebooks except the current section". I would prefer not to have the tags (GTD contexts) that I placed into a list appear in a new list. Right now, if I run "Find Tags" with "Create a New Summary Page", the first time I run it I get the list I want; the second time, I get every tag doubled, because it is included tagged items in the list created earlier, and so on.
Other tools that create such extracted lists or tables - e.g. FrameMaker, which can create lists of arbitrary paragraph types - change the type of the thing searched for from TagName to TagNameInListOfTags, to prebent that "multiple extractions" problem.
I would also like to be able to rearrange the list of tagged GTD contexts, and "refresh" by adding only tagged Next Action items that are not already in the hand edited list. However I have only seen that in wikis I have modified.
e) Renaming or changing the format of OneNote tags does not seem to change the format of existing tagged items of the old tag name/format.
f) WORST: OneNote on my iPhone only supports ToDo tags, none of the customized tags.
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Related: I have been using OneNote for many years, mostly predating my latest attempt to adopt GTD.
I often have a section, section group, or even a notebook for some projects. Perhaps that should be for the "Project Support" stuff, rather than the GTD Project itself.
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Anyway, just thinking.
Probably over-thinking. In part, because coding up such things is a bit of a hobby. I like to think of what I would have in an ideal world where I could add any feature I wanted to SW I am using - and then figure out what compromises are necessary to work with the software we have.
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9/13/2018 (Next Day)
Ouch! Just noticed this in a different thread
https://www.pcworld.com/article/326...6-in-favor-of-the-windows-10-onenote-app.html
Good: the Win10 OneNote app supports vertical lists for sections and pages.
Bad: the Win10 OneNote app does not support custom tags Unfortunately, I recently started using custom tags for the GTD Next Action contexts, as explained above.
MORAL: never use advanced features of apps. (But, are custom tags "advanced"? I have been using them since 2009, just not for GTD stuff.)
Bad: I have been using and writing OneTastic macros for OneNote 2016. I will bet that these will break.
I purchased, and enjoyed, the GTD & OneNote Setup Guide:
https://store.gettingthingsdone.com/OneNote-for-Windows-Setup-Guide-p/10415.htm
But this seems to be for OneNote 2016. I hope that it will be updated to mention the Windows 10 OneNote app, and, perhaps, stuff that yu can do in one version of OneNote but not the other.