OneNote 2013 and a Laptop: Creating a Daily Docket (Shown on Surface Pro 3)

In the past few months, I've been working hard on using a daily plan. In particular, I advise a daily docket either in paper form or in digital form. 

A daily docket is not the same as a daily planner page. A daily planner page is made way ahead of time and is generally used instead of weeklies for people with really busy schedules or lots of tasks every day.

In contrast, a docket is a plan only used on busy days, where you combine information from your monthly calendar (events and appointments) and your weekly or daily planner pages (task lists) to make TODAY's plan (or tomorrow's, but not something way in the future).

As a general rule, I think paper is superior for creating a daily docket. After all, the process of writing and planning is so important for getting things accomplished. As you write, you make decisions and input information, not just onto the page, but into your brain.

However, I do most of my work (legal work and blogging) on-line. So I got a fancy machine, a Surface Pro 3, along with One Note 2013, to preserve the advantages of handwriting while putting my daily plan on-line.

I wanted to share a trick for using OneNote on a laptop, for those following my great experiment into electronic planning. I *think* that this trick would work with any laptop and the free OneNote 2013 download from Microsoft.

The Trick: Prepare a daily plan in OneNote.Then, click on"View" (in the top tabs in OneNote), followed by choosing "Dock to Desktop."

That made this happen:

Now, while I work on the computer, my daily plan (or any other page in OneNote, including a recipe, a note taking page, or a new Word document) is waiting for me to write on all the time.

It doesn't take up too much of the screen and keeps my planner much lighter and easier to carry with me everywhere.

I ONLY recommend this for a daily docket. I still think planning needs to be on paper. But I love this tool and plan to use it for a while.

Etcetera.