OneNote as a Second Brain: My Workflow for Maximum Productivity

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

As a History Teacher and Form Tutor, as well as someone who wants to prioritise his health and fitness, life can get really, really busy. If I didn’t have somewhere to write down all of my thoughts and feelings, I think my brain would actually explode.

For years, I’ve been invested in the idea of a Second Brain. This is the idea that any thoughts you might have should be ejected onto a piece of paper, since the brain’s best use-case is for creating new ideas, rather than storing them. I think this will make sense to a lot of us: how can you possibly be expected to keep track of everything that you learn or encounter in a day, while also trying your best to process those ideas and develop them into something great?

There are so many Second Brains out there; you see Youtubers, especially, advertising them all the time, from Notion to Evernote. OneNote has been serving me pretty well for the past five years as my Second Brain. I’ve used it to record all of my thoughts and rumblings, from shopping lists to plans for blog posts. At its core, it’s best to think of OneNote as a digital notebook of sorts. You can store and sort a bunch of different ideas, organise them according to topics, themes or categories, and even separate them into sections in different notebooks.

Better yet, OneNote gives me the flexibility to swap between pen-and-paper by using a  stylus, or I can keep everything neat and streamlined by typing everything out with the keyboard on my iPad. 

But what’s the core feature that keeps me coming back to this Second Brain over any other service? You’ll already know that I use a Bullet Journal to keep track of the day-to-day running of my entire life. I think that OneNote complements that really nicely, even in 2025.

Here’s why OneNote is still my top choice for a Second Brain in 2025.

How I use OneNote

The biggest bonus of using OneNote is its cross-platform syncing. I can open the app on my phone, desktop or iPad, and I’ll be editing the exact same piece of text, based on where I think I work best at the time. Any of the notes I’ve made can be searched using keywords. To take it up a step even further, I could add tags to group my notes together, though I’ve not yet added that degree of optimisation. At the moment, I feel like it would take a little bit of time to get used to doing this consistently, which would then take away valuable time from what I want OneNote to do – to help me to be creative.

Otherwise it would risk turning into another case of productive procrastination, and we don’t want that.

My main use-cases are organised into different digital notebooks. I’ve chosen some basic categories to sort all of my notes: Health, Writing, Blogging, and Work. When I first started as an ECT teacher all the way back in 2020, this was great; all of my work-related content lived there. However, considering I can’t link my work iPad to my personal OneNote account (and wouldn’t want to, anyway; gotta maintain that work-life balance somehow), it quickly fell out of use. It’s probably the 51st thing I should have added to my list of 50 things that I learned as an ECT.

My most-used notebook is for Health. This gives me space to record recipes that I find online, recipes and shopping lists, as well as workout suggestions. OneNote features a basic but essential tick-list, meaning that I can quickly tick off items as I add them to my shopping basket.

Writing collates all of my ideas in one place. I especially like the idea of transcribing my voice clips directly into OneNote, since I’d be able to speak directly onto a canvas all of my ideas. However, this is currently only available on their Office365 desktop version so, for now, I’m sticking to using VoicePal to help with broadening out my ideas.

The Blog notebook gives me space to collate my ideas for this space, where I can then expand on what I’ve written and create a brief schedule to show when I’d like to publish everything. Then, I can search these ideas to see if I’ve missed anything when I’m doing a planathon.

I have dabbled with a notebook strictly for language-learning in the past, where I’ve tried writing things down and translation the Spanish versions of various websites, but have found it far more useful to use apps like Duolingo (click here to find out whether its Super version is worth the cash), Lingopie and Fluenday instead.

I did try to keep all of my notes online by using a digital Bullet Journal for 30 days, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of that. Sometimes, having an extra space that’s dedicated solely to Bullet Journaling can actually keep you more focused and, by that logic, more productive. Speaking of, click here to find out the secrets behind my Bullet Journalling system.

But what’s really keeping me on this app in 2025? Why OneNote over any other Second Brain?

Why use OneNote over anything else?

Truth be told, I’ve not had the pleasure of dabbling with many other Second Brains. If you’re in the market for one, I’d have a play around with a bunch of them to see which works best for you. When I bought the Samsung Galaxy S7 and entered the Samsung ecosystem for the first time, I used Samsung Notes quite prolifically. It worked fine for what I needed it for, but there wasn’t much organisation involved. Over time, I transitioned into OneNote as an alternative that was already installed on my laptop.

Then I splurged and picked up the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (full review coming soon), which comes with a stylus, and my world changed. Whenever I hover the stylus over my screen and click the ‘S-button’, a window appears which lets me create a Quick Note. As a result, I can rapidly scribble down any thoughts I’ve had in a way that’s much faster than in OneNote. I’m not as big a fan of how Samsung Notes organises things, though, which is why I’ve not migrated over.

Equally, when I first started teaching, I used to do all of my lesson planning in Apple Notes. Now, I use Freeform, thanks to its seemingly unlimited canvas and a focus on stylus-usage on a bigger screen. But, you know what? There’s nothing wrong with using your device’s stock app – if that’s what works for you. Some people will also throw a to-do app in there, too, but I feel like that’s making things needlessly complicated.

The real reason that I’ve gone for OneNote, combined with scribbles on Samsung Notes and lesson planning in Freeform, as well as my life-organising Bullet Journal, is happenstance. I started using it years ago, it worked well for what I needed; and that was that. Unless something miles better comes along, I’m going to stick with what I know.

One snag that you should be wary of is that, last October, my OneDrive cloud storage had filled up, which completely killed my Second Brain for about a week. This was until I realised that all of my photos had been syncing automatically so, if you’re planning to use OneNote, make sure you turn that off and use a different Cloud Service for your photos (or splurge on the paid subscription service).

Have I convinced you to try out my Second Brain? Or do you already use OneNote? How about a different setup for keeping yourself organised and productive? Let me know how you get on with your own systems in the comments below.

If you liked that, you’ll love…

Follow my socials!

One thought on “OneNote as a Second Brain: My Workflow for Maximum Productivity”

Leave a comment