My OneNote Writing Template

As part of moving my writing workflow to OneNote I needed to ideate a solution around creation of new draft articles in a consistent and efficient manner. In plain English…I needed a template. Templatizing work in OneNote using the desktop application is an easy enough process with some powerful functionality built in just for this reason. Unfortunately said functionality doesn’t carry over to the universal and mobile versions. With this limitation in place, I defined a template to leverage the copy function in OneNote for creating new pages.

Part of having the template is to not only provide a uniform structure for my writing, but in this case, to make sure steps in the writing process are not missed as it moves through the workflow. Following this requirement I added sections in the template to track items such as :

• Photos for the article
• Publishing steps
• Social media distribution steps

You can see by the image below how my basic template handles those items. I create the title for the article and the body in their corresponding sections then track down an appropriate image to use with the post. I add the link to the image in Google Drive (that’s where I keep my images) under Photos and fill in the checkbox when it is done.

Once the article has been posted to The Idea Pump, the image loaded, and corresponding tags identified, I complete [The Ideas Pump} checkbox. Next step is the social media distribution. As the article is posted and scheduled in each social media outlet, I complete the checkboxes to indicate the work is done. Also the article has been moved from Draft to Editing to Published as each of those stage gates are passed. In this way, if I have time to sit down and do some editing I can just open the Editing section on my phone while I’m waiting and catch up on some edits regardless of where I am.

I’m making constant revisions and updates to this workflow but already I’m starting to see improvements in my process. The next step is to improve my research workflow…

Originally published at www.theideapump.com.