Mastering the One Notebook System aka Your Key to Staying Organized

You may have heard about my One Notebook System, but did you know there’s a critical second part to making it work? In this episode, I’m diving into the processing method that turns this simple system into a powerhouse tool for staying organized and stress-free. Whether you’ve tried the One Notebook System or you’re just hearing about it, this episode will walk you through how to fully unlock its potential.

This system has helped over 15,000 women take control of their time and eliminate overwhelm. Ready to make it work for you? Tune in and take the first step toward mastering your One Notebook System.

In this episode, I cover:

• The three-step process for organizing your notebook’s contents
• How to determine your personal categories of information
• Why you only need a few tools to keep everything streamlined
• The importance of processing your notebook regularly to stay on top of your life
  
  

Join the FREE One Notebook Challenge
and Kiss your Notebook Clutter Goodbye
January 27th-31th, 2025
www.megansumrell.com/onenotebook

________________________________

Overwhelmed? Frazzled? Tired of your calendar controlling you?
You are in the right place! Sign up for this free, on-demand training and learn how to gain control of your time no matter what life throws at you!
>>> https://www.megansumrell.com/freetraining
________________________________

Thanks for tuning in!
Megan 🩷🐝

www.megansumrell.com
www.instagram.com/megansumrell
www.youtube.com/@the_pink_bee
www.linkedin.com/in/msumrell
www.onelink.to/qxdcwu

Transcript

[00:00:00] intro: You may have heard about my famous one notebook system, but here's what you probably don't know. There's actually two parts to the one notebook system. And if you don't do both, then it's going to fail you. 

[00:00:12] Hey there and welcome back to Work Life Harmony. Here we are in the new year and this is an awesome time for us to revisit a tool system, etc. that I teach and personally use that has changed now over 15, 000. other women's lives. All right. We've had at least 15, 000 that we know of learn what I, what I call my one notebook system.

[00:01:30] Now I've talked about this system before here on the podcast, but what I have not shared with you is really an in depth view into the back end part of this one notebook system. And that's what I want to focus on here today because this really is the secret sauce to what makes this entire one notebook system so unique.

[00:01:51] Incredible. Now, before we jump into that, I want to just take a couple seconds here and give you kind of a recap of what is this one notebook thing and why is it changing lives all over the world? So the one notebook system, again, it's incredibly simple and powerful, but it's really life changing. And at its heart, what it means is you have one notebook and one notebook only at any given time that you are putting into practice.

[00:02:18] All your stuff into ideas, notes, tasks, things you want to remember maybe you're jotting down notes as you're taking a training, et cetera, all in one place, meaning you have a mishmash of information in there. Now, for some of you, you might be like, Whoa, no, Megan. I love having all my notebooks, right?

[00:02:38] Maybe you have a notebook for work, one for home, a separate one for the online learning course that you're taking, another one for your creative, you know, processing. Maybe you've got the notebooks then in the car, by your bed, by your desk, one in your purse. So that way you always have one handy to write stuff in, right?

[00:02:58] Now for some people, what this looks like is a flavor of apps, right? You may have five different apps on your phone, one that's capturing to do's, one that's capturing something else, one that's capturing ideas, one that's writing down that book recommendation someone gave you. So for some people, it may not be physical notebooks.

[00:03:14] It could be all these digital, you know, disparate spaces that you're funneling all this information into. And you know, the, the intent is always good when we do this, cause we're like, I'm going to get more organized. But then what ends up happening is. And when the time comes and you're like, Oh, where'd I write that thing down?

[00:03:30] I don't remember. So now you're looking through, you know, 10 different notebooks and post it notes and scraps of paper everywhere. You can't find anything quickly, which often also leads to things fall through the cracks. Right? So this is why I started the OneNotebook system for myself because I found, I couldn't find stuff.

[00:03:49] I'm like, Oh, that's how I'm in that program. I have a separate notebook for that program, but that notebook wasn't handy when I remembered something. So I wrote it in the notebook that wasn't about the program and it just, everything got out of control. So the, the intent again, is you have just this one, Notebook.

[00:04:05] Now, people always ask, what happens if something comes up and I don't have my notebook with me? I'm going to cover that when I teach the Complete One Notebook system for free. At the time you're listening to this episode, we're going to be kicking off my free One Notebook challenge next week. All right?

[00:04:19] I've got info for you on how you can get signed up. So hang with me. But I'm going to teach what the one simple strategy is for how you handle that when you're on the go. But today I want to focus on kind of the back end part of the OneNotebook system and why this is so powerful. So essentially there is a three step part to what I call processing.

[00:04:44] your notebook. So the one notebook system isn't something where you just have this one notebook, you write everything in it, and now you collect notebooks over the years that you're thumbing through trying to find information. That's not going to save you any time, right? Plus, you don't want to collect notebooks upon notebooks.

[00:04:59] I'd have, I don't even know how many if I'd saved all mine. So the real power in the one notebook system is in, is in what I call processing it. Now, Part of this, this entire framework here is you get to decide how often you're processing it. I will be teaching in the one notebook challenge to start it by doing it once a week.

[00:05:18] So I process my notebook once a week. Now i'm going to introduce you to these the three steps of this processing part and then you'll be able to see me do it. I actually watch it happen inside of the OneNotebook challenge. So in order for this OneNotebook system to work, the first step with our processing is understanding, and this will be unique to everybody, what are the different categories of information that are going into the OneNotebook?

[00:05:47] your one notebook, right? Because if you're streamlining everything into one notebook, there's going to be lots of different types of stuff in there. So you're going to learn how to come up with what your categories are. So let me give you some examples. You may have tasks in there, something that you remember, Oh yeah, I got to get that done.

[00:06:04] And that's essentially a task that's ultimately going to need to make it into your plan either this week, next week, next month, you are, you know, another way to think of it is to do's. All right. You may have instructions written down there. Maybe you're watching a quick YouTube video to figure out how to do something and you're, you're jotting down notes for yourself.

[00:06:22] Right. That could be another category. You may have inspiration. Just, Oh, I heard this quote and I love it. Right. You just may have a category of things that you want to save because they inspire you. Maybe you're a big into cooking. You may have all sorts of recipes. You know, for me, I get a lot of ideas, like ideas for podcast episodes.

[00:06:41] So that's another category is ideas of things that I want to act on later. So again, there could be gobs of different categories and I'm going to teach you how you identify what your different categories are. So that's the first step of getting this processing component up and running. Now the second step, once we have our categories, is to pick One place for each type of category that's going to be your ultimate repository of that style of information.

[00:07:16] Alright, so let me give you some examples for that as well. Maybe, you know, let's say, let's talk about that first example of tasks or to dos. You might be jotting something down and then as you're processing it, you're like, Oh, I actually, like, I need to get that done next week. Well, anything that needs to happen in the next seven days goes right into my top planner.

[00:07:36] That's what I call my command center. It's what I look at every day that tells me what I'm doing and when I'm doing it. So if it's, you know, needs to be handled in the next seven to 10 days. Where that information goes as I will then put it directly into my planner if I see that it got into my one notebook, not directly into my planner to begin with.

[00:07:54] As I am taking notes on, you know, I, I'm always doing personal development. I'm learning new things. I take courses, all of that. If I need to type up notes from something because I'm going to need to reference them later, I have picked where I do that is in Google Drive. So I have a folder. Where I can type up notes and I love Google drive because I can search on it and always find what I'm looking for.

[00:08:17] Right. But what I don't do is have, you know, one tool to store notes for this class, but then a separate tool to store notes for a different class. Right. I'm picking one tool for instructional cat, that category of instructional stuff I need to reference later. Now it might be let me give you an example for ideas for the podcast.

[00:08:37] Right. Here at the Pink Bee, we use ClickUp as our project management tool. So almost everything related to the business, either future work or current work is captured in there. So I have a place in ClickUp where we store ideas for future podcast episodes. As we're planning out our content, we know we can always look there and see the running list of ideas or questions we get from listeners, ideas you have.

[00:09:04] So, again, what we're doing with this second step is we're saying for each type of info, where is that style of information going to live? And you're going to pick one, one, just simply one place. Now in kind of an advanced part of this, and I'm going to, again, be going through this in great detail in the One Notebook Challenge, is I challenge everyone to say, let's pick as few places as possible.

[00:09:29] Always trying to minimize our tool set, right? And so I always ask people, is there a tool you're already using that you can now leverage for this category of information? Let's do it, right? We don't need a separate tool for every single type of information, right? So you may use Google Drive for lots of different categories.

[00:09:49] of information. You might use a project management tool for lots of different categories of information. All right. And as you're thinking through what tool you would want to use I'll always say people, okay, instinctively, where would you go to look for that? Like today, if I were to say, hey, where where's, where do you go to look for recipes that you want to make?

[00:10:09] And if you're like, Oh, I go to my Pinterest board, then we'll be like, great. That's where we're going to save that kind of information. Like what is your go to? Because here's what happens when I see a lot of people happen, happen to people when they're first doing this is they go look for new tools like, Oh, okay, great.

[00:10:25] You know what? I'm going to, I heard about this cool app. I'm going to try using that for this style of information, but instinctively they're not using it. They've never used it before. It's not a natural go to. So then they use it for a couple of days and then it's two weeks later. And they're like, okay, yeah, I, where did I, Oh, where did I put that thing?

[00:10:42] And I'm like, crap, I can't remember because it's not something that they naturally go and look and look to. You know, kind of an example for this that happened to me just the other day, like I have a set place where I store gifts because I do a lot of shopping ahead of time either for the holidays, birthdays, whatever, because if I see something that I know someone's going to love, I grab it.

[00:11:02] And so I have a set place in our house where I put. gifts that I have purchased ahead of when I need to like wrap them and give them out. Well, I had forgotten that last year I was like, Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to do this other place that I've been using the same place for years, but I don't know why, but on some whim, I guess I decided that I was going to start collecting really early stocking stuffers and put them in a place that I don't usually.

[00:11:30] store gifts. Well, did I remember that when the holidays came and I was wrapping up stocking stuffers? I absolutely did not because it had been tucked away somewhere else for a couple of months. Well, now here we are in the middle of January and I was doing some tidying up and guess what I found. I found a whole bunch of stocking stuffers that never made it into stockings for the holidays because I wasn't used, I wasn't honoring the, where would I instinctively go to look for that thing, right?

[00:11:57] I was trying to break something that was already working. So this is why we want to really leverage patterns and behaviors that we already have. So again, step one, and we're going to do this in great detail together, is understanding your categories of information. And then step two is picking one. Place for each category.

[00:12:17] So that way you don't have recipes in three different places. You don't have instructions across four different apps right now. The third part of this is then figuring out what is your, what is your rhythm going to be for how often you process your notebook? Like for me, I typically do it on Friday afternoons as I'm shutting down my, my work life heading into the weekend, but I'm going to teach you how to decide what's going to be a good rhythm for you.

[00:12:43] Okay, so I just kind of wanted to give you a little bit of some insight into what you're going to be learning exactly how to do inside the one notebook challenge. Because if you decide to go down to just one notebook, one central place to gather all the info, that's only half the battle, right? We can't be collecting 50 notebooks all year and then, you know, what's the point of writing it down if we never actually get it?

[00:13:06] Act on it or we can't find it when we need it, which is why the processing part is going to be so key to all of this. So starting again, when, when this episode is dropping on the following week, Monday, January 27th is when I'm going to be teaching this entire one notebook system for free. I do it in 30 minutes or less each day.

[00:13:25] All right. And it's going to be streaming over on YouTube. So it's really easy for you to come and catch. If you want to join, just head over to megansumrall. com forward slash. One notebook. Spell out the word O N E. One notebook. I've got a link for you in the show notes. Again, doesn't cost a dime. We'll send you the links to everything and on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is when you're going to learn the entire One Notebook system.

[00:13:47] I'm going to be doing a bonus video on Thursday. I'm going to show you how you can leverage a Rocketbook notebook, if you've ever heard of them, where it's actually ones you can write with, you know, paper and pen, but then it can, you can take pictures of it and it can, like, print them out. Turn it into PDFs.

[00:14:01] It can actually transcribe for you. So if you really want to be digital storage, but you like the idea of writing, you're going to see how you may decide to use a Rocketbook notebook. And then finally, I'm going to wrap things up with a one notebook challenge doing something I don't do often for free, which is I'm going to be teaching you some of the weekly planning process that's inside my signature program, but I'm going to be teaching it with the lens of how the one notebook system ties into.

[00:14:28] This weekly planning process, because these two things alone, my one notebook and my top planner, I, without those, I would be an absolute disaster. And it's the, what I love is they're just elegantly simple tools and systems. So I can't wait to teach you everything you need to know inside the one notebook challenge.

[00:14:49] And if you're listening to this ahead of time, you can start proactively thinking about, What are those categories of information? What tools might you want to use? And I will be sharing the exact tools I use. And guess what guys? There's really three main tools. That's it for all of my categories and a fourth one for, for a smaller subset.

[00:15:10] So can't wait to see you all there and I'll see you right back here next week for another episode.