Things have gotten a bit quiet in "gyrospace" lately. Perhaps this is because folks have given up on their new year's resolutions or moved on to other tools. I'm hoping it is because we are all successfully focusing on Getting Things Done rather than tinkering with our systems and surfing blogs.
After [...]
It is actually more like version 122, but "2.0" sounds better. It has been about four months since my last post on OutLinker and I wanted to let folks know that several improvements and bug fixes have trickled onto the wiki since then.
The macro now defaults to routing transfers to MindManager through [...]
Chuck Brown posted some questions on GTD and MindReader as a comment on AO-Pack blog entry. I thought answering via a post would make sense as it provides some elbow room and an opportunity for others to chime in.
… I understand that GTD is not a set of absolute rules, but tools to [...]
Back on New Year's day I proposed Five Metrics for assessing the state of your GTD system. The idea was to assess the Freshness, Focus, Feasibility, Foresight, and Finishing (5F's) of your current next actions and combine these into an overall score.
The Next Action Analysis macro calculates and sorts these metrics [...]
One of MindReader's handy features is that it allows you to send tasks to specific maps based on a keyword. This allows you to avoid having to deal with a huge "Daily Capture Map" backlog when you want to sort out things related to specific project or area of responsibility.
Previously you needed to [...]
One handy feature of MindReader is its ability to set the current contents of the clipboard as a task's hyperlink or note if you include a keyword (isnote, see note, islink, see link). As currently configured it always grabs the contents of the clipboard and puts it in the queue file because it [...]
[Editor's Note: Jose Miguel is a the MindReader power user and has driven the development of many of its features. In this guest post, he describes how he came to use the tool and how he uses it day to day. A Spanish version of his post is also available. ]
Until [...]
[Nota del editor: José Miguel es el poder MindReader usuario y ha impulsado el desarrollo de muchas de sus características. En este puesto de invitado, él describe cómo llegó a utilizar la herramienta y la forma en que lo usa día a día.
Una versión en Inglés está también disponible]
Hasta que descubrí
2007 was a year we largely focused on improved capturing and staging of tasks with tools like MindReader, Mark Task Complete, and OutlLinker. Perhaps 2008 can focus on improved weekly review and action? To kick it off and to provide some group moral support for getting things done, I'd like to propose [...]
I noticed I began experiencing frequent "The application has been requested to terminate"-type crashes since upgrading to the SP1 release for MindManager 7 where as the original release was pretty stable. I was a bit worried this was due to MindReader or OutLinker, but realized this evening it is likely due [...]
I made a few big improvements to the OutLinker macro today.
It now stores its configuration settings in a notes folder so it is easier to upgrade/configure without editing code. It will also prompt user for the archive store/folder if it doesn’t find them.
For fun it counts the number of messages you have processed [...]
Outlinker is evolving quickly as it gets some use and the suggestions trickle in. I used it to successfully drain my Gmail inbox to zero for the first time using Microsoft Outlook this morning and made several edits along the way.
The macro now lets you select the messages you want to process [...]
When was the last time your inbox looked like this?
The holy grail of Getting Things Done (GTD) is routinely emptying your various Inboxes to zero and processing the context into projects and next actions. Tools like GyroQ can help you capture ideas and process your paper in-trays, but if you are working in the [...]
If you or your company use McAfee for virus scanning, then your GyroQ executable was likely automatically deleted yesterday afternoon due to a false-positive in their virus signatures for 32/YahLover.worm. The McAfee signature file was fixed by midnight, but you'll now have to reinstall GyroQ. See Gyronix Forum for [...]
I've noticed several other incompatibilities between the MindReader tags and GyroQ 1.9.4.9 in addition to the q issue described earlier. Gyronix will likely have this address shortly, but in the meantime you'll want to stay with 1.9.4.7 or below if you want to use MindReader. If you have already upgraded, you should [...]
One of my long-time "Someday/Maybe" tasks has been to draft a blog post on the MindReader Configuration Map. I figured I'd push this off my aging task list with a quick post this evening and follow up as needed.
Although MindReader is designed to work "out of the box", the mindreader.mmap file provides [...]
My ResultsManager Daily Action dashboard has gotten a bit bloated over the past year with a subset of tasks and projects that are lingering. In theory a good GTD Weekly Review would help address these, but I've been playing with some alternative strategies to break the log jam.
I now use the GyroQ [...]
The latest version of GyroQ (1.9.4.9) leads to a glitch with the older version of the MindReader "q" tag that causes MindReader to mark up the centraltopic of the destination map instead of the new topic. To address this, just paste the packed text of the new q tag into the GyroQ dialog [...]
If you are using the "Mark and Log Task Done" macro (a.ka. "mtc" tag or mark-task-complete.mmbas), please download the updated version the macro from the wiki Macro Library.
The previous version of the macro acted on the currently selected tasks and got confused if you changed the selected task while it was running. [...]
In my ongoing quest to stake claims on as many single letter GyroQ tag names as possible, I've added the following three new tags to MindReader:
"a" inserts a task "after" the selected task (inserts a parent task)
"b" inserts a task "before" the selected task (adds a child task)
"p" inserts a task in "parallel" with [...]
Is the "Review dashboards for aging tasks" action item you added to your list after reading a recent post becoming an aging task itself?
Even if you are capturing and completing dozens of tasks each week, a couple of them will invariably be "amorphous blobs" or have something about them that leads you to not complete [...]
One of the central themes of GTD is learning to recognize when a task on your to-do list is not really the "next action". David Allen typically points out that "Get New tires" needs to be preceded by "make appointment for tire replacement" and that preceded by "find phone number for garage".
Mal [...]
The latest newsletter from DavidCo pointed out that David Allen is now writing a weekly GTD article on the Huffington Post. His 2nd contribution, Think Smarter by Capturing your Ideas is absolutely required reading for GyroQ and MindReader users.
"How many thoughts and ideas do you have daily which represent useful [...]
Jose Miguel has made several great off-line syntax and code suggestions for MindReader that have led to several changes over the past few weeks. The morning's new version of mindreaderNLP.mmbas has several new features:
You can now specify any @context, ^area, resource@, or ~category using the syntax in this sentence. MindReader [...]
Although the site's first post was back in August 2006 (Chapter 1), the first visitors started trickling this a year ago this week to read Committed Projects and Next Actions and Top 20 uses of GyroQ". Since then the site has accumulated just under 25,000 visits and 100,000 page views. [...]
Basecamp is a popular web-based collaboration tool from 37 Signals that enables project teams to create to do lists, set milestones, and share files over the internet. Basecamp doesn't have the flexibility, power, or GTD-focused design that ResultsManager provides, but it does appear a bit more easy to use for web-based collaboration.
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While [...]
Up until now MindReader has processed individual tasks entered at the GyroQ prompt. Mal mentioned on the GTD-mindmanager yahoo group that it would be useful to have a drag and drop capability to pull in tasks he was accumulating in his Palm PDA.
In order to address this need, the MindReader "q" [...]
Throughout the development of MindReader, the key challenge has been to find ways to make it easier for readers to install, configure, and use it. I have been pleasantly surprised by how taking the "configurable" approach has made the program more powerful and easier to use personally, particularly for use on multiple machines in [...]
Bill S. pointed out on the new ActivityOwner forum that one downside of having site content spread out across the blog, wiki and forum is that readers may forget where they saw something and need to search all three individually.
Looking into this problem I discovered that Google launched a custom [...]
If your ResultsManager activities typically have start date entered (e.g. if you use MindReader), then you might find an added feature of the "next-action-verb-analysis" macro useful.
The new version of the macro calculates the average age of your next actions and enumerates those stragglers that are more than twice the average. This provides [...]
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