ActivityOwner.Com - Getting Things Done with MindManager, ResultsManager, and GyroQ » MindManager

What is the Next Action for ActivityOwner.Com?

ActivityOwner — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:27:03 +0000

Reviewing my ResultsManager review dashboard this morning I found just a couple of projects related to my "blog" area and a long list of someday/maybes. I thought it might be useful to solicit reader guidance on where it would be most valuable for you to focus. Basically I'm wondering whether to focus on discussing, enhancing, or documenting MindReader, OutLinker, Mark Task Complete, Next Action Analysis, or Map2Excel or to focus on discussing my GTD workflow using these tools.

I would appreciate it if you could please click here to take a brief Survey Monkey survey or comment below.

I've recently cleaned up the layout of the site with a new site overview map and new "related post" links added to the entries. I hope it will help folks navigate around the posts on their topic of interest.

Send an OutLook Message to a New Project Map

ActivityOwner — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:32:49 +0000

Often times the first step in processing an email request is to define a dedicated project map to attack it. The latest version of OutLinker has a new send to "New Project" map option. This will create a new MindManager project map, attach the message, message text, and/or link, mark it up based on your outlinker settings and MindReader keywords, and prompt you for the next action.

This version also improves the display of the archive folder name and store. See screen shot of outlinker interface.

This function mimics the mindreader "nm" tag.

A different approach to marking tasks complete

ActivityOwner — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:28:03 +0000

Juan has been collecting on his 2008 Next Action Analysis Contest prize with some macro requests. This weekend he asked for a MindManager macro that could take a ResultsManager dashboard with tasks that had been manually set to 100% complete (not processed with the "d" tag or "mark task complete" macro) and process them all at once with mark task complete. Right now you have to select sets of tasks and run the macro to mark them complete.

The new "ao_select_complete_and_mtc.mmbas" macro on in the mindmanager macro library and added by the new install will do as requested by Juan. You can manually set tasks complete (including repeating tasks) and it will process them in 1 shot. You just need to make sure you run it before you refresh the dashboard. Juan envisions having this macro run as part of the "Put it in front of the door" script.

If you take this approach, you want to avoid using the built-in ResultsManager "send changes" command before running this macro as it will permanently set repeating tasks complete if you set them 100% complete in the dashboard.

I figured I put up a quick post in case others wanted to test it or had ideas on how to best implement approach.

Put it in front of the door in 2010

ActivityOwner — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:50:44 +0000

Two of the biggest barriers to making good use of ResultsManager for Getting things Done (GTD) tend to be (1) the need to manually refresh dashboards and (2) the need to access to do list items away from your computer.

When you sit down to get too work, the last thing you want to do is to tie up MindManager with a several minute dashboard refresh as this is a perfect recipe for going off on some web distraction.

One way to get around this is to make use of your computer's task scheduler to automatically refresh your dashboards on a regular basis. This approach was first described 3 years ago in in the "Put it in front of the door" post.

I recently got this running again on my new Windows 7 computer and did some work to clean up the script and make it easier for others to implement. The script is now installed as part of the MindReader Setup program and can be run by running the "rfd.bat" file in the "My Maps\AO" directory. MindReader and Mark Task Complete have also been updated to work better with multi-computer synchronization.

The script also does several other things now such as running next action analysis and a recently added capability of saving the dashboard in html format. If you are a hard core ResultsManager user, this script is for you.

For more information, see the "Put it in front of the door" page on the wiki..

Please comment below with questions/suggestions/problems.

Happy New Year,

How to Synchronize MindManager Maps Across Multiple Computers

ActivityOwner — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:49:26 +0000

I treated myself to an inexpensive Toshiba NetBook from Amazon on Black Friday so I am now in the mode of thinking how to use it to access and edit MindManager maps I've traditionally maintained on my desktop machine.

There are a number of options and I wanted to solicit readers for input. I think the best way to do that is via the wiki.activityowner page on synchronization. I know several readers have researched this and come up with solutions that work for them.

Please edit in your thoughts and experiences on the wiki or comment below. Editing on the wiki is easy and just requires a quick account creation step that helps the site avoid spam.

Synchronizing MindManager and OutLook

ActivityOwner — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:06:10 +0000

A reader writes by email…
Dear AO,

I use your "Put it in Front of the Door” script daily and I find it very useful. I would like to add a feature to the script, which is synchronizing the dashboard with my tasks in Microsoft Outlook using the “Export task info to Outlook” feature of MM. How could I implement this?

Thank you in advance,

The "Put it in Front of the Door" script is a great way to keep your ResultsManager usage alive and well. I must admit it fell off my windows scheduler with an operating system upgrade awhile back and its time to bring it back.

I've been using MindManager and ResultsManager for over 4 years now and have never heard of anyone successfully using OutLook Task syncronization with both. I tried in my very early days and moved away from it quickly.

If you think about it, it is a quite complex series of operations to ask for. First ResultsManager harvests tasks out of dozens of maps and summarizes on a transient dashboard. Then MindManager needs to syncronize those rolled up task copies with an OutLook task list and figure out what is new/done/deleted in each. Then ResultsManager needs to push some of that completion information back to underlying maps. Too many things can go wrong.

In practice I use the OutLook Task List as as dedicated input flow to MindManager rather than something it populates or syncronizes with.

At work I send and receive about 120 message each day. I drag my sent items into my inbox so conversation threads are in same place. I use OutLinker to process these messages. If something seems like a short term item I push it to the task list using the "OutLinker Lite" functionality. For example if I expect a reply in a week or so or expect conversation to continue. Most items tend to be "waiting for X next week". OutLinker puts the task due date in and associated person in the "company" field. I will also sometimes capture into task list directly on blackberry. Every so often I run OutLinker on the task list and push lingering items to MindManager maps using MindReader. So in practice I work from my daily action dashboard and from my outlook task list. Not ideal but better than no list!

If you wanted to do the reverse and dump your full Next Action list to the OutLook task list, that would be relatively easy to do with a macro. You would just need to empty it each day before hand or perhaps the macro could look for duplicates and delete them. I just wouldn't want to pull back from this list.

At home what I do is use the "mna" (Mail Next Actions) GyroQ tag to send my next action lists to my gmail account as emails by context (see "You've got Mail…from ResultsManager". This gives me ready-access to my lists at work and on the road. I don't worry about checking them off remotely and sync-ing back.

Questions? Suggestions? Experiences?

Comment below.

Using MindManager as a Twitter Reader

ActivityOwner — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:10:04 +0000

Like most MindManager users, I tend to be an early adopter, so it feels odd to have gotten on the twitter bandwagon just a few weeks before Oprah. There is a lot of noise, but I have found useful information I would not have otherwise come across. I use it as another means of alerting folks of new tools posted to the wiki or new entries on the blog. I don't think it will ever find its way onto my phone, but it offers an interesting view into what folks are doing in the MindManager/GTD area each evening.

One thing I have found difficult is figuring out how what I have already "read" in the stream of twitters coming in. Some folks just post occassional nuggets that get lost in the stream. I'm sure the twitter clients allow you to mark things read, but its not obvious to me how.

So, just in time, Andrew Wilcox this evening twittered a link to an experiment he did with using the News Smart Map Part to import and organize twitters from his friends. This reminded me of the MindManager RSS News Reader posted back in March 2007.

The macro in that tool takes the RSS feed and logs it in a "database" as well as feeding it into an in-tray. That allows you to copy/paste/mark-done/delete the topics and not have them reappear when you refresh the feed. I mainly use the tool to process tasks coming in from Jott and to process blog comments via RSS to make sure I have closed out the action items associated with them.

To try this out, I first went to twitter.com to get therss feed for my account, which is .

I next used this to "Add new news feed to library" in the map part tab in MindManager. In order to do this using MindManager 8, I found I had to first manually add a "News Feeds" folder to the tab, otherwise the add-news-feed command didn't do anything.

Once the news map part is created, you drag it into the MindManager map:

Once you have create a map with the feeds you want processed, you next run the rss_to_intray.mmbas macro to processed the current feed content into a "rssdb" topic and an in-tray.

The macro is available in the MindManager macro library or you can automatically install it using along with other AO tools using the Setup program. If you use the setup program, the macro will be located in the My Maps\AO directory and can be run manually or with the rssi GyroQ tag.

Once you have the entries into MindManager, you can process them manually or using a tool like ResultsManager to feed them up to a dashboard (perhaps with a someday/maybe or list filter).

Export a MindManager Map to Microsoft Excel

ActivityOwner — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:23:46 +0000

Mind map users need to deal with the rest of the world, which lives in lists and spreadsheets. Even MindManager users themselves often have a need to look at their map context in a less graphical format for analysis or printing.

Map2Excel is a simple no-frills macro for exporting a map or portion of a map to Excel. It can be launched as a macro or using the new m2e GyroQ tag. If you select the central topic or nothing is selected, the whole map is exported; otherwise the children of the selected topic are exported.

The macro prompts the user as to whether to export the map in tabular format, with parent information for each child topic included in each row, or in outline format:

Tabular Format	Outline Format

The macro and GyroQ tag can be downloaded from the export tools section of newly reorganized MindManager Macro Library. The GyroQ Tag used to more conveniently launch the macro is optional and can be installed by pasting its packed text into the GyroQ input box. The easiest way to get both is to run the setup program, which will install them along with MindReader, Mark Task Complete, and other tools.

OutLinker for MindManager 7

ActivityOwner — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:43:39 +0000

OutLinker has always worked with MindManager 7, but the recently implemented installer defaulted to using the MindManager 8 type library, so users would need to go in and set this reference in the visual basic editor themselves. There is now a dedicated installation program (download) for MindManager 7 users that eliminates that step.

How long is a typical email message?

ActivityOwner — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 15:07:04 +0000

Awhile back an OutLinker user ran into trouble transferring a large Microsoft OutLook message into MindManager via GyroQ. We determined the shear size of the transfer was the problem. We don't know precisely how big is too big, but in order to minimize the risk of that happening, OutLinker now has an upper limit on the quantity of text transfered in that manner. Picking a reasonable value for that required some statistical analysis.

In order to come up with an answer, I found a large email archive and wrote a short macro that looped over its 15295 messages. The macro spit out the length of each message yielded the chart below:

This may not be a representative distribution of "typical" email messages and threads, but it was roughly consistent with a second work-based archive I analyzed. The average length of an email message was 3150 characters and with a median of 1304 characters. There were six over 100,000 characters and one over 200,000.

In both data sets, 98-99% of tof the messages were less than 20,000 characters, so that seemed like a reasonable upper limit to implement for transfers from OutLook to MindManager via GyroQ for now. If you try to transfer the body of a message larger than that limit, OutLinker will warn you and trunicate it down to 20K. You can avoid this limit by doing a direct transfer using "Send to Active Map" or "MindRead"

With the younger generation moving to txt messages and 140 character twitters, some day our kids will marvel that we used to write short novels in our email exchanges.

OutLinker Setup Gets Easier and New Attachment Feature

ActivityOwner — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:18:17 +0000

Outlinker has evolved quite a bit as I've gotten more familiar with the capabilities of VBA in Microsoft OutLook and gained the advantages that the installation program provides in making forms easier to deliver.

The latest release of OutLinker uses a form to set configuration options rather than the OutLook notes folder. The configuration information is now stored in the registry, which speeds up startup significantly and allows settings to be changed on the fly during the session (e.g. change archive folder for a set of messages).

You access this by hitting the "Options" button on the main form:

The archive folder can now be chosen by browsing to it by clicking on the button.
.

This change has enable the restriction on archive folders being at the root level to be removed. Now any folder in any location can be used. Usage statistics can now be viewed by clicking on the "Stats" button on the interface:

The other big change is that OutLinker can now attach a .msg file with the full outlook message (and its attachments) to a topic in a map in addition to providing a link to the archived message. This is a key feature if you want to use it on collaborative maps where links to your pst file are meaningless or confusing to your collegues. It also reduces the risk that your will misplace information if the link between your map and pst gets broken at some point. You need the latest release of MindReader for this feature to work for queued items. The "Send to Active Map" command will work out of the box.

The one other new feature is the addition of a "Relationship Map" button. I often direct items that are not associated with a specific project to a dedicated map for the individual I'm communicating with. I do that in MindReader by setting up a destination keyword for that map in the form of "namemap". I found I was doing this manually quite a bit with the form version of OutLinker. Now if you check the "m" checkbox in the "relation" section, a keyword will automatically be composed using the other person's email address name.

I'm hoping this is the last of the major OutLinker updates for awhile. If you have found installation to intimidating in the past, I think this may be the version for you. The setup form simplifies things quite a bit.

OutLink to your OutLook Task List and other new options

ActivityOwner — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:00:43 +0000

Several new options have trickled into the OutLinker GUI interface as it has gotten some use. These are available in the latest Beta download from the OutLinker Installation page.

If you review the screen shot above most are self explanatory, but here is some background:

There are four ways you can "send" the item you are processing:

TaskList: Lets be honest. You've got 300 items in your ResultsManager daily action list and you are afraid to send urgent/important items into the abyss. The "TaskList" button will let you move the selected email message to the archive and create a new task list item with an OutLook hyperlink to it. This allows you to use the OutLook task list as a near term action list. If you later run OutLinker on a task created in this way, it and send it to MindManager, it will create a link to the message (rather than the task).
The ability to create OutLook tasks with links to messages has general use as well. In particular this opens up the opportunity for people to use OutLinker even if they don't have MindManager. Note that OutLinker already had the ability to function without ResultsManager or GyroQ as well. A version will need to be created that doesn't complain about lack of MindManager Type Library references. As time goes on, more "MindReader" like parsing can be added that mark up the OutLook task. Note that the Input box keyword for using this feature is s2tl.
This is a new feature so tread carefully.
MindRead: Send to MindManager immediately with destination determined by MindReader
Send to Actve Map: Sends immediately to the subtopic of the currently selected topic. T~~his button won't be shown if MindManager is not open.~~ . Outlinker will open MindManager and send to a new map if it is not currently open.
Queue: Add to GyroQ queue to be sent to MindManager later. This will be shown as "Send" if you don't have usegyroq option set.

New Features on Interface

Average Processing Time: Are you moving along at "2 minute action" pace? The form now keeps a running average time on task. It resets when you "Exit" from the form. This will need some tweaking to figure out when it should be running and reset.
Delegate: You can now delegate to addressee or sender. The "addressee" check box automatically get set if you are processing a message you have sent rather than received. The other persons name is now shown in the form rather than cryptic olwf, olio, etc keywords.
Done: If a task is complete but you want to log it in MindManager, you can check the "done" box.

Misc. Notes
Below is a summary of some items from discussion of previous release as well as a few lurking "Mention this on the blog" items I wanted to check off:

Note that OutLinker assumes you have MindManager 8. If you are using 6 or 7, you will have to go into the OutLook macro editor and check off the appropriate type library when it complains.
If you use other custom OutLook macros, manually install the macro and forms from the wiki rather than using the setup program.
If you prefer the old "Input Box" interface, which retains focus and is better for keyboard processing, you can toggle back and forth using the "oltf" command (entered by itself).
Note that if you put in the keyword "aey" in MindReader or OutLinker, it will pop up the ResultsManager edit dialog after MindReader finishes so you can add additional mark up.
OutLinker will transfer OutLook Categories into MindManager
You might want to turn off the "putmsginnote" option if you frequently process messages with a large body of text as this will sometimes cause GyroQ to fail during the transfer. It will also bulk up the size of your frequently used maps.
If GyroQ does ever fail during transfer, edit the "My Maps\GyroQ\GyroActivator-Queue.txt file with a text editor and edit out the offending "{Queue:…" block in order to resend the queue and get at the items that went into queue after it.

Anyone care to volunteer to take the action item of editing all the above into the wiki documentation?

Outlinker GUI

ActivityOwner — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:38:09 +0000

The OutLinker script for processing your Microsoft Outlook inbox into GTD next actions and MindManager links now has the default option of using a form instead of an input box as a user interface:

The installation program for the software is on the wiki.

This means you can now:

Interact with messages directly while program is running (e.g. scroll)
Use mouse to navigate and choose options in addition to using command line (a,s,p, etc still work)
Use additional check boxes and option buttons to set target date, etc (see image)
Send messages to the currently open map/selected topic using the "send now" check box (s2am command).
Open attachments — either directly or using the "open attachment" button (o command)

In particular this now makes it easy to set the transferred task as being owed to or form the sender or to be put on a "contact about" list for them (previously using olwf, olio, olca keywords at beginning of task).

The send now command can be handy if you want to keep your short-term items on a current map to work on during the day rather than send into your longer term GyroQ queue.

Note that the form communicates back to the main OutLinker program via the text box codes familiar to earlier users. The start up of the program is also about 2x faster now after some code optimization.

MindReader 2.0

ActivityOwner — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:16:53 +0000

After a few weeks of shakedown and clean-up, it seems the setup.exe program created to install MindReader, Mark Task Complete, and Next Action Analysis and their associated Gyronix GyroQ tags is just about ready for prime time.

If you are a MindManager user and have wanted to give these tools a try in the past, but prefer your software installations to be "two-minute actions" instead of "projects", now might the time to give things a go. If you have used the tools, but haven't kept up with the incremental improvements over time, this also provides an opportunity to get caught up and keep up to date.

A big thanks goes to Hans, who developed the installation program using Inno Setup, and to Reenie, Marco, Stefan, Ron, Mike and others for testing out the early versions. The installer has performed well, with most of the glitches related to my overhaul of the tools themselves in preparation for use with the installer.

As part of this effort the wiki documentation for using and customizing the tools has been cleaned up with the help of Reenie. I'd recommend browsing the pages for MindReader, Mark Task Complete, and Next Action Analysis. In particular you might want to have a look at using the MindReader m tag in order to familiarize yourself with the full capabilities of MindReader.

For detailed instructions on downloading and installing the software, visit the Setup page on the wiki. Note that OutLinker still needs to be installed manually and should be updated as part of this upgrade if you are a legacy user.

If you do run into any issues, post comments below so they can be addressed.

Mark Tasks Complete Faster

ActivityOwner — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:54:04 +0000

The Mark Task Complete macro evolved incrementally from a short GyroQ tag into a fairly involved macro and got inefficient along the way. The new version is streamlined and should perform quite a bit faster. If you are a regular user of this GTD tool, I'd recommend downloading it. This version also defaults to storing completed tasks underneath each topic instead of in a floating topic. Let me know if you encounter any bugs.

One other way to speed things up if you are a long time user is to clean up your completedlog.mmap file by moving all the branches to a separate mindmanager map. Frequently used maps may also have a lot of tasks accumulated in the floating completed topics, although speed issues associated with that are addressed with the move to project-based storage.

Gyronix has made great progress in their early beta versions getting GyroQ and ResultsManager adapted to MindManager version 8 and I imagine they will be broadly available (at least in beta form) soon.

I've been keeping notes on how to migrate use of tools from this site on the wiki Migrating to MindManager Version 8 page.

How to have your contexts and contact them too

ActivityOwner — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:51:37 +0000

While I haven't been at 10.0 level for awhile, I've been happily Getting Things Done (GTD) using MindManager, ResultsManager, GyroQ along with the Outlinker, MindReader, Next Action Analysis, and Mark Task Complete macros. In general I've found running the NAA script on the daily action dashboard points me at the right widgets to be crank to to get back on the GTD wagon each day, while the other tools allow rapid map updates so that the process does not become an end it itself.

The system and tools have been pretty stable from a development point of view, but I recently noticed an opportunity to slightly improve the default ResultsManager daily action dashboard template that I thought I would share.

A key concept of GTD is translating your projects into next actions and organizing them by context. Often the value of context assignment is the journey rather than the end. If you think about the specific "how", "where", and "when" of the next action, you will force yourself to translate it into a more "physical" action than it otherwise might be.

One area I am trying to improve is better defining contexts that match my personal situation and style. In practice there have been only a few lists that I proactively seek out from a context point of view:

"phone" (short for "weekday 9-5")
"errands" (particularly important in this era of high gas prices)
"contact X about" (very useful in combination with the the "relationship central" "I owe" and "waiting for"

The problem comes when a "contact about" next action also involves a context. For example…

Take ActivityDaughter to store to shop for camp supplies (@errands, ActivityDaughter@)
Call TravelAgent about summer vacation (@phone, TravelAgent@)
Call mom for mothers day! (@phone, mom@)

The default ResultsManager Daily Action dashboard filters are set up to avoid you getting a long list of "No Context" next actions that are really "Contact X about" items, by filtering out next actions that involve "partners" from the "@" lists and channeling all these to the "contact…" branch. The result is an errand or call that has a partner doesn't show up on the errand or calls list.

This can be addressed by breaking the context-list branch into two such that one captures specific contexts (regardless of partner) and another captures "no partner/no context" items. I thought I would share the procedure for those interested in learning more about customizing dashboards.

Assuming you already have a daily action dashboard generated, you can quickly open the underlying template by clicking on "open template" on the ResultsManager menu:

If you expand the "Next Actions" branch you can see there are parallel "partner" filters, with the first excluding any "contact about" partners from the next action lists and the 2nd to enumerate them:

What we have done here is leverage a lightly documented filter parameter of "_undefined" and "NOT _undefined" to channel defined contexts to the first branch and then "No Context" items to the 2nd, which are further filtered by the original "Partner=N" filter.

Once you have adjusted your dashboard template, you can save it and start using it. If you would prefer to keep the original, you can change the dashboard name (under application/prepare/properties):

and then save it in the "My Dashboards" folder (or elsewhere if you choose):

If you have chosen to save the template as new, you need to "install template" from the ResultsManager menu while it is active to add it to your list of available dashboards:

If you have questions, just comment below. If you want to learn more about how to build a dashboard template from scratch, see the 7 steps on the wiki. If you don't want to go through the "do-it-yourself" exercise above, you can just download the template from the ResultsManager Dashboard Library.

Six Components of a GTD Review

ActivityOwner — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:46:51 +0000

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 three years of exploring and tinkering (I bought ResultsManager in May 2005) and collaborating with many of you, I feel I've finally developed a balanced "trusted system" approach that works for me utilizing OutLinker, MindReader, Next Action Analysis, and Mark Task Complete. These macros have finally allowed me to fully leverage the MindManager, ResultsManager, and GyroQ applications.

The Next Action Analysis approach has been pivotal in proving a look at things in a more balanced and comprehensive way. The "game" of trying to empty Outlook inboxes and raise my NAA score has provided just enough incentive to get me to plug my GTD leaks and attack those lingering "high cringe factor" items clogging up my dashboard.

Previously I would spend all my dashboard and review time at the top of the Daily Action Plus Dashboard trying to empty in-trays and deal with items past their deadlines or targets, and neglecting other aspects. Now I feel like my focus shifts appropriately to the 5F that needs the most attention.

After using this set of tools for four months, this week I finally hit a perfect 10.0 on my personal maps and also got my work maps up over 9. If only I had got here during the contest :-).

A trend of my score over time is included at the bottom of the post based on the data collected in the NAALog.mmap. I tend to work with my personal maps on the weekend while doing chores and errands and paying bills :-(. Along the way I spent a lot of time fighting back the tide on each of the 5F's in turn. Once the macro gave me my "perfect score", the question became "what is the next action"?

To celebrate I took a break this evening to create the diagram above, which captures the NAA framework concisely and graphically. This may be helpful to you whatever GTD system or tools you actually use. What makes the next action analysis macro useful is that it generates quantitative metrics for these components and links out to the items that impact each of them (e.g. overdue or aging tasks) rather than requiring separate dashboards for these purposes.

The figure adds a 6th component to the five covered by the NAA tool, which is asking whether you are capturing the "Full Picture" of your work. You can't automate that, although GyroQ can be used to run a full "MindSweep". The other aspect captured in this component is the need for a regular review of "someday/maybe" lists to see what deferred projects merit activating. You might implement this by using a weekly repeating task reminder and then ensure that it stays fresh!

Of course for me what really remains now is finally giving more attention to "non squeaky wheel" projects and actions not currently in the penalty box. I won't be at 10.0 for long if I don't attack the 60 next actions on my home list and 80 on my work list. Unfortunately blogging isn't on either of them :-).

All the best,

Logging Next Action Analysis Results

ActivityOwner — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 02:04:00 +0000

The Next Action Analysis macro has been updated to log your scores into comma delimited notes on a mindmanager log map each time you run it on your ResultsManager daily action dashboard. The central topic note contains the date/time stamp, the overall score, and each dimension's score. The branches contain tables with the actual values of each metric. You can paste the results into Excel and generate a trend of your overall score or of any of the 11 metrics.

Note that the scoring has been adjusted to encourage more context assignment. For background on the tool see previous posts or its wiki page.

OutLinker 2.0

ActivityOwner — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:40:55 +0000

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 GyroQ, which is much faster. I didn't want to publicize this until I'd tested it out on a few thousand messages. It is working well now that issues with escaping quote characters have been resolved. If you choose, you can avoid use of GyroQ by setting the "usegyroq" setting to 0 and just have items transfer in real-time. You can also avoid use of MindReader by setting "usemindreader" to 0. All you really need is Outlook and MindManager.

The script now uses session variables and a cache to hold information in memory between uses, which has improved speed quite a bit — thanks for the tips Mike! The menu of commands has been expanded as shown below:

I use the macro by selecting anywhere from 1 to 250 messages at a time and then dispatching them quickly by either deleting (d), archiving (a), or by typing in an action item to send to MindManager. Non-action reference items can be sent over by adding a "isinfo" keyword.

It can be mentally challenging to transfer "urgent" items over to MindManager, but if you resolve to get all the way to "zero" and add short term target dates to urgent items, you can move over to MindManager and use your ResultsManager "Daily Action" dashboard and the
"Next Action Analysis" macro to guide your day.

All settings and counters for the scripts are kept in a "OutLinker Settings" Notes folder:

If you are currently using the script, I'd recommend pasting the latest version of OutLinker.bas into your macro file. If you have tried it in the past but ran into bugs or glitches, give this version a go. If you haven't tried it yet, have a look at the installation instructions on the wiki and post below if you have any questions.

GTD and MindReader Q&A

ActivityOwner — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:35:58 +0000

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 use to your benefit, but am not comfortable with something key in the Next Step, concept. We're told that if something will take more than say, two minutes, stick it in the system. I assume this leads to documenting every step that will take more than two minutes? But it can't, or we would document going to the grocery store as 200 steps, obviously making the process more laborious than is beneficial. So how do you know how to break projects down?

Is it entirely arbitrary? The system is very keen on next steps, but what about all of the 'other' steps? So, I'm going to build a house myself, and the Next Step is to draw blueprints. But I know that to draw blueprints I need to buy big paper, and when I have them I'll need to go to the copy store and make copies, and I'll need to look in the yellow pages for contractors, and I'll need to make a list of contractors to call, and I'll need to call each one, and, and, and… By breaking this into discrete components (especially if I'm going to take the time to enter them into an electronic system), I would seem to exponentially increase the time it will take to get the project actually done. Maybe I'm missing the bigger picture, and I admit, I'm on the very outside edge crawling towards the center of all of this…

David Allen has a knack for ironic phrases like "the center is the edge", "being complete with your incompletions", etc. Perhaps the analogous phrase he might use to answer your question would be "Getting things done is about getting things done".

Barriers to getting things done

What barriers get in the way of getting things done? Not capturing the "things" in the first barrier. "Things" can sit in your inbox, on your desk, workbench, garage floor, or mind. GTD stresses capturing all your "stuff" in a trusted system of some type. This is where tools like GyroQ and OutLinker come in. The "2 minute" rule relates to the trade-off of the time needed to process something into your projects and next action lists versus just doing it. I think with advent of fluid tools like those covered on this site, that guideline might need some revising, but that's for another post.

Once something is "captured", the next "not getting done" barrier can be lack of clarity on what is the first baby step to get it moving. This is where "next physical actions" come in. Although it has evolved to do quite a bit more, MindReader was initially conceived as a way to try to automatically assign "contexts" based on action verbs in phrases going into GyroQ or in MindManager topics. Sometimes the thought process of identifying the "next physical action" involves a backward sequencing process (replace tires – schedule visit – call store – lookup phone number) that generates a string of next actions. Once you have gone through that thought process, you might as well capture it in a map so that checking off the 1st step automatically queues up the next, but its not essential. Often just getting that 1st physical next action identified early catalyzes the rest of the process to move ahead quickly and naturally.

The third barrier to getting things done can be lack of having all those unrelated baby steps organized by "context" so that you can advance them efficiently. Among its other capabilities, ResultsManager excels at harvesting all your next actions from a network of project maps and laying them out for you in a single dashboard of next actions by contexts. Having a convenient "context" list can make you more productive in the little snippets of time that might otherwise be used inefficiently or go to waste. With gas prices being what they are, an "errands" list is all the more important.

The Chess Analogy
So how you do you break projects down? When I envision GTD, I think of what it could be like to be one of those grandmaster chess players who can run around a room and play 30 games (projects) at once. Now perhaps they do that by instantly recognizing the pattern on the board each time and the best next move. If I was going to do it, I'd have a project map for each game with some working notes and reference links on it, and a task reminder that the other player had the next move and to make sure I came back to it. I might also have a "next move" lined up based on the previous "review" of the situation for that game (project).

Thinking about this in another way, "Getting things done is not about what you are getting done". You don't need to document each completed action, or plan each next action for a project you are actively working on. You just want make sure you set projects up (or set them aside with) at least one next step to keep things moving.

Next question: Just want to make sure I understand something about the technology. I understand that MindReader requires MindManager/MindJet and Gyroq, but does it REQUIRE ResultsManager? (I have all of these tools, just trying to wrap my head around what does what). If I understand correctly, RM is really just a reporting tool (maybe an important one, but still a reporting tool). Is this correct?

No, technically MindReader doesn't require ResultsManager or even GyroQ (it has some limited functionality running directly on topics as a standalone macro), but there is a lot of synergy amongst the tools. MindReader enables GyroQ to capture and set the context, due date, priority, etc of a large quantity of tasks and spread them across many maps in one step. This is most useful if you have the ability to pull all that information back together into a dashboard with ResultsManager.

Other readers can provide additional insights below.

2008 GTD Challenge Results

ActivityOwner — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:48:27 +0000

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 for ResultsManager users by harvesting information from the Daily Action Dashboard. It also creates lists of actions and projects associated with the various components (e.g. aging tasks) as well as provides targeted advice on how to attack and improve your situation.

To have some fun with this, and provide readers with a framework for "climbing back on the GTD horse" in the new year, we initiated the "Next Action Analysis 2008 GTD Challenge". The goal was to get an initial assessment in the 1st half of January and then work to improve it by the end of the month.

Thanks to everyone who entered. It isn't easy to share the state of your "system". I think it was helpful to everyone to see that others are in the same boat. The entries and results are summarized below (Courtesy of Map2Table):

	Initial Score	Final Score	Improvement	Current Score
Juan	2.00	6.07	4.07
AO	6.40	7.50	1.10	9.59
Arkadiy	6.77
Bill S.	7.60
DW	7.95
Jose-Miguel	8.20	9.82	1.62	9.41
Mal	7.00
Renaldostheold	7.40	9.22	1.82	9.96

And the winners of the 2008 GTD challenge….

Highest Final Score: Jose-Miguel
Biggest Improvement: Juan
Random Drawing: Renaldostheold

I think a few of these folks may have already claimed their prizes :-).

Here are some random thoughts and advice on use of the tool…

Context is King
In general it felt like the revised scoring was well balanced, and put me on the areas needing focus, but the one area that probably merits more weighting is the penalty for actions lacking context. The "no context" list is always with ripe with "blobs" that need more thought and review. Eliminating items from this list tends to help several others scores. For example sending them to someday/maybe, defining a new/younger physical next action, marking already complete items done, can be impactful on several dimensions. I am looking at raising the weighting here but need to decide where to steal the points from. Thoughts? My guess is "project proritization" or "Target Dates".

My Favorite?
If I personally had to give up using all but one tool from this site, this would be the one that I would keep. I have found it has kept me focused on all aspects of my system and forced me to address the stale tasks that were bogging it down. The delay in getting this contest entry posted is a testament to that as the "game" of improving your score can keep you focused on your important projects (rather than your blog :-).

How Many Next Actions are Too Many?
In order to get 10.0 on the "feasibility" scale, you need to knock your next actions down to 80. You'll only get a 5.0 on that dimension if you have 150 actions. That's a pretty stiff penalty, but the purpose is to reinforce the concept of actually doing the items on your list rather than carrying them around for weeks or months at a time. The scoring make your next action list expensive real estate that you want to populate with things you are committed to doing in the near term.

Do you Trust your Trusted System?
I've found the key to using tools like GyroQ, MindReader, and OutLinker to capture commitments into MindManager, is knowing that you maps are not black holes. If you don't trust it, you'll tend to keep "important" items piled up on your desk or in your OutLook Inbox. Keeping your NAA score up, and reviewing the flags it raises regularly, can help you build that trust into your system such that it become closer to 100%.

Are your Projects Projects?
It is very easy to fall into the trap of throwing all your tasks under "area" buckets (e.g. "Home Repair") that last forever rather than defining specific projects. The project priority and target date metrics are there not so much to yield benefits to your dashboard, but to help you decide whether a project should go to the someday/maybe list or be broken out as a smaller/more specific project.

Are your Targets Targets?
As mentioned above, the purpose of the target date assignment metric is not so much for the value of setting targets, but for forcing as many items as possible into defined/do-able projects. One thing you want to avoid is perpetually setting unrealistic targets such that you spend your time discouraged by them or postponing them.

If you use "Mark Task Complete" to set up routine "good habit" reminders, try setting just the start date rather than both the start and due date. For example, if you have a daily reminder called "empty in-tray", set it as a "daily" with just a start date. That way it will show up on your next action lists, and you'll take satisfaction in checking it off, but it won't clutter your "overdue" lists.

How to Deal with In-trays?
Based on my experiences with this tool, I've begun setting up my in-tray's with a "project" icon, particularly on "map central" maps. The key advantage of this approach is that it ensures that its parent "project" flags as needing next actions if it becomes empty. It also helps you avoid letting random "bits and pieces" actions find there way in under a map central map. I'll blog more about this later. You can also remove a central topic from the project list by giving it a category of "mc*", but this option should be used with care.

Have you tried it?
The script has improved quite a bit over the last month, so if you haven't done so recently I would recommend downloading the latest copy. Recent versions provide the option of opening a wiki page dedicated to providing advice on improving the weakest aspect of your score. If you are a routine dashboard user, or have ResultsManager, but have "fallen of the GTD horse", give this a try. It doesn't require that you have any other "AO" tools. All you need is ResultsManager for generating Daily Action Dashboards.

Next Steps?
Any interest in further contests? Are there any other aspects of the DA dashboard that could be assessed? I'd write more, but I need to get going on some procrastinated "next actions" so I can improve my "Freshness" score :-).

Mark Task Complete Updated

ActivityOwner — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:57:15 +0000

If you are using Mark Task Complete, note that it has been updated so that it now logs repeating task completions in the floating "completed" topic and also moves completed topics from the plan, even when updated from the dashboard.

Four ways to add tasks to your maps from your phone

ActivityOwner — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:03:18 +0000

In a message on the GTD-MindManager Yahoo group, Juan asked about ways of getting tasks into MindManager from his new PDA. I thought it might be useful to cross-post a reply here for posterity:

Here are four options for getting items into your maps from a mobile device.

Use bitbucket.org to mail yourself task from the PDA and then pull
the tasks in via an RSS map part (see A MindManager-Based RSS News Reader.
Take that approach one step farther, and call in your tasks verbally
to Jott with the phone rather than typing them in. This is handy for
use when driving (see GTD Phone Home. ActivityDaughter also uses it to remind Dad of things like the need to get started on her upcoming Volcano project.
If the phone's task list is Outlook synced, you can pull the Outlook tasks into MindManager using OutLinker.
If you capture the tasks in a note, you can paste the list into the
MindReader GyroQ "q" tag, and it will process and parse each line separately into
separate tasks. You don't need to paste them 1 by 1. See Feed your todo list into MindReader.

I personally tend to just carry two thin Moleskine notebooks (one work/one personal) in my pocket and log things there for later manual transfer with GyroQ.

Related posts:

The Matrix

ActivityOwner — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:19:52 +0000

MindManager provides a great environment for group brainstorming on issues and ideas and for organizing information. While you may start out in an unstructured way, you will often find your final product has a 3-level deep structure such as in the Pro/Con analysis shown below.

In these cases it can be handy to convert this into a tabular format for sharing or review as shown below.

The tabular format can be particularly appealing to map-averse "list people".

The map2table macro can do this conversion quickly for you. The resulting html file can be shared on a web site or easily imported to Excel or Word. It creates the table by compiling a list of the main topics under the selected topic (usually the central topic) and then searching each branch to accumulate the 2nd dimension of the table. You have the choice to set the 1st layer topics as the row to column headings.

The tabular format is also useful when you want a new way to look at a custom ResultsManager dashboard like "Committed Projects and Next Actions" and assess the balance across your areas of responsibility (see earlier blog entry).

Note that the macro will capture a 4th level of detail by combining the text of the underlying topics into the title text of the table hyperlinks so they can be view if you hover on the entry. It also adds hyperlinks associated with the topics by default. More details are available on the macro's wiki page.

MindReader turns 1, gets its braces taken off

ActivityOwner — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:47:45 +0000

Although the first prototype emerged earlier, the first production version of MindReader made its debut 1 year ago last Sunday. I'd like to thanks to all who have helped take it from its early 14-word vocabulary to the large collection of keywords it recognizes today.

Recently we've been debating how to best read your mind in the comments. I like to use natural keywords in an action to signify something (e.g. call Jose) but often a disposable keyword works best (e.g. isproject). While commenting on the desirability of avoiding the need to add [braces] around these types of keywords to make them not show up in your final task, I realized that with a few lines of code most "disposable" keywords can be recognized and removed from the task.

If you download the latest version of MindReaderNLP.mmbas from the macro library, you can now type "Download MindReader someday @web p1" and it will be converted to "download MindReader" with priority-1 and someday icons and a context of @web. Previously you would have had to type "Download MindReader [someday p1 @web]". You can continue to use braces for items like destination map keywords.

Note that MindReader also now recognizes full dates directly without the need for ## delimiters, so you can type "Pay taxes by 4/15/08!" and it will set the deadline at 4/15.