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 [...]
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 [...]
Mike P. inquired off-line about the possibility of importing data from nactionr into MindManager for use with ResultsManager and provided a sample nactionr xml file. nactionr is a pocketPC-based GTD tool.
I don't have experience parsing xml, and wasn't going to even attempt it, but then remembered that MindManager can open [...]
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" [...]
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 [...]
A key strategy of GTD is breaking down your projects into a sequence of Physical Next Actions that you can sort into context lists to be done when appropriate. The ResultsManager Daily Action Dashboard provides you with these context lists.
The new Next Action Verb Analysis macro scans the next actions [...]
Felix Nyffenegger has created a freemind powered site (wikimindmap.org) that lets you browse wikipedia on a topic like the Tour de France in mindmap format.
Felix was nice enough to set up a wikimindmap that provides a real-time view of the content in wiki.activityowner.com. It is not on the main wikimindmap site menu, [...]
The activityowner.com libraries for GyroQ Tags, ResultsManager Dashboard Templates, and MindManager macros have been moved over to the wiki. The lists have been sorted out and cleaned up a bit, so if you haven't looked at them in awhile, now might be a good time:
ResultsManager Dashboard Template Library
GyroQ Tag Library
MindManager Macro [...]
While it can be character-building to hunt around the new MindManager 7 menu for things like My Maps, Map Markers, Task Info, Map Parts, and the Library, you can save yourself a lot of time if you go in and immediately reactivate the MindManager 6 sidebar tabs as shown below:
This was mentioned in the ResultsManager [...]
It's not actually "ResultsManager 7" — the humble folks at Gyronix have only incremented their 3rd digit (2.7.7 to 2.7.8) — but for a free upgrade, their upcoming MindManager 7-compatible release provides a significantly improved interface and adds real day-to-day value. While experienced users may have some difficulty generally adapting to MindManager [...]
The recent ActivityOwner.Com review of MindManager 7 mentioned that a big downside of the new release was a bug that prevented the file operations in MindReader macros from working correctly when called by GyroQ. After some experimenting we've found that if file closure commands are moved to the end of the macros, then [...]
On Saturday morning I confronted my ResultsManager Daily Actions Plus dashboards in MindManager facing several dozens items in my @web, @home, @errand, @workpc context lists. The problem was I had the flexibility to be in almost any of these contexts at that moment.
The GTD approach in this situation is to [...]
Kevin posted a question on the Gyronix Message Board looking for a method to compile an event log using GyroQ. He suggested using an approach analogous to that used by GyroTimer and even provided a mockup of what he is looking for:
As I mentioned in Top 20 Uses of GyroQ Revisited, the GyroTimer gys [...]
As most ActivityOwner.Com readers are likely aware, Mindjet is launching MindManager 7 on May 31st. Marc Orchant and Chuck Frey have enumerated the new features of the program in detail, so I won't go into them here. I would note that the upgrade pricing from version 6 has not been announced, [...]
Over time I've customized the GyroQ "You've Got Mail" script to send me three separate email messages each morning based on ResultsManager dashboards that have updated overnight– one for deadlines, one for targets, and one for next actions.
This morning I noticed that while the targets and deadline messages were showing up fine, the [...]
I recently started experimenting with wiki.activityowner.com as a means of more flexibly gathering and updating knowledge about MindManager, ResultsManager, GyroQ, and GTD, and to enable activityowner.com readers to participate in documenting tools like MindReader and Mark Tasks Complete.
This feels like a bit of a retreat for a map evangelist, but while [...]
The recording of Gyronix CEO Nik Tipler's webinar on using GyroQ is now available. The audio isn't all that hot, but the content is good, particularly around 32:45 if you are a MindReader fan :-).
On a related note, David Allen's long-time tech guru Eric Mack has a MindJet Webinar on Wednesday March 28th [...]
Hans poured over the MindReader code and made several great suggestions, additions, and bug-fixes. For example, MindReader now adds a gray "blob" icon if it does not a responsible resource or an action verb to use in assigning a context. The big addition though is of a new GyroQ MindReader "s" tag. [...]
RSS Feeds were recently implemented for both the Yahoo MindManager and GTD_MindManager groups via mailbucket.org. The MindManager group focuses on general MindManager issues. The GTD_MindManager group focuses on utilizing MindManager for GTD, with lots of ResultsManager discussion. The group recently passed the 1100 member mark and is growing steadily each week. [...]
The MindManager Viewer Browser Plug-in provides a convenient way to share MindManager maps to a broad audience without requiring them to own MindManager or to install the desktop viewer application. It can be particularly hand on an intranet as means to avoid read-only users from locking out people needing to edit maps.
The [...]
The recent GTD Phone Home post described a method for automatically capturing voice input from Jott and/or email input sent to mailbucket into a ResultsManager in-tray using the MindManager rss smart map part.
The method works surprisingly well except for one hitch — each time you refresh the rss map part, it re-imports all the topics. [...]
How are you ever going to keep your inbox empty if GyroQ keeps putting an updated plain text outline of your ResultsManager "Daily Action" dashboard in it every morning?
That problem aside, web-based email is now nearly universally accessible from home and work, and increasingly by mobile phone. Always having an updated next-actions list [...]
Early last month there was some discussion on the GTD_MindManager Yahoo group brainstorming about ways we might be able to communicate into ResultsManager remotely someday using email or smartphones. Tommy pointed out a blog entry on using mailbucket to email entries into MindManager using the RSS smart map part.
Around the same time a post [...]
One of of the perennial questions that comes up when using ResultsManager, or almost any personal productivity system for that matter, is how to handle with repeating items. Many repeating items (e.g. daily exercise, weekly review, etc) are important items that you want to "put in front of the door" to develop [...]
Mindjet has announced an upcoming Webinar by Nick Tipler from Gyronix on using GyroQ. Registration info is available here.
See background info below:
Event:Having trouble staying focused on your project?
Date and Time: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 10:00 am,
Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)
Panelist(s) Info:Nik Tipler, CEO Gyronix
Duration:1 hour
Description: Taking Control of Interruptions [...]
One of my favorite GyroQ tags is "cna" (Copy Next Actions), which is described in the "Next Actions to Go" post. It takes my current ResultsManager "Daily Actions" dashboard (typically the one I've regenerated overnight), finds the next actions branch, and copies them to the clipboard as a plain text outline for pasting into [...]
A earlier post on ActivityOwner.Com introduced a GyroQ tag to mark a task complete in a dashboard or map and save a copy of the task in a year/month/date-sorted "completed" map. The tag works well, but can be a little slow as the "completed" map grows in size. While GyroQ's selection [...]
Creating a detailed post on installing and configuring MindManager and ResultsManager has been on my someday/maybe project list for awhile. After seeing Kyle's very useful "Top 10 Mapping shortcuts" , I thought perhaps banging out a bulleted list sooner rather than later would be useful (and get it off my list as well). [...]
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