It’s obvious that to-do lists and note taking can boost your productivity, but when you end up with a stack of paper on your desk, topped with a sticky yellow square reminding you to organize your notes, it becomes counterproductive. When it became too much to bear, I tried stacking several pocket sized paper notebooks with subjects assigned to each one of them. This idea helped clean up the mess, but it was still too inconvenient for the times I wanted to quickly jot down a passing thought or two.

Finally, after finding the motivation to hunt down a better solution, I discovered an amazing program called NoteBook by Circus Ponies. The features go above and way beyond what you would expect from the simple name. Shortly after installing the easy to use 30 day trial, my productivity soared, and I was hooked. Imagine all of the following features at your fingertips as just a basic starting point, with so much more:

• Note-Taking and Organizing - Organize your information using a familiar notebook interface, complete with pages and tabs. Arrange notes hierarchically in each page’s outline, in ways that make sense to you. Collapse or expand hierachies to hide or show detail.

• Annotation -Annotate your notes with keywords, stickers and highlighting. Add an action item checkbox, set a due date, or assign a priority.

• Clipping - Copy text and other content directly into a Notebook without leaving the application you’re working in. Pre-edit clippingsbefore sending them on to your Notebooks.

• Searching - View all of the words in your Notebook and where they appear. Or all of the keywords, stickers, highlighting and other attributes- Index Pages make simple searching as easy as clicking. Use NoteBook’s Super-Find panel to perform complex searches involving multiple words and attributes.

• Importing - Transfer photos, images, film clips, and sound files directly into a Notebook from your digital camera, or scans from your scanner. Then use Media Frames to enhance your images with special borders, dropshadows, rotation, and scaling. You can even add in video clops or movies, complete with a standard playback control strip for convenient viewing or replay.

• HTML Publishing - Export your Notebooks to the web to share with non-NoteBook users. Use the default export options, or customize the look and structure of the exported pages to fit your project.

Are you wondering what all of that looks like? View the online video tour.

NoteBook is a dream app for me, but if you’re looking for something simple that is a little more powerful than Mac’s Stickies, check out Sidenote for a multi-document drawer that will hide in the corner of your screen (left or right) and allow you to take all your daily notes, include images and easily modify text color and font.

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