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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
If you are using OutLinker you may have achieved Inbox Zero for the first time in awhile. Don't stop there.
While your inbox contains a mixture of spam, bulk mail, info-only cc's, and perhaps 10% actionable information, your "Sent Items" will tend to have a much more concentrated set of …
commitments [...]
The Next Action Analysis tool's report has evolved quite a bit over the last two weeks (see picture below) since the initial post (5 metrics for assessing your GTD System).
Here is a summary of the changes:
Added more targeted recommendations for the specific metrics with the most room for improvement [...]
[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 stood by the side of the road a few weeks ago waiting for AAA to show up to change my flat tire. In my PDA I had "Identify day I can get to dealer to replace balding tires" on to do list, where it had sat for several weeks. Here I am [...]
The latest version of OutLinker will let you select a set of upcoming Microsoft Outlook appointments and process them into MindManager so that ResultsManager can remind you to get prepared for them. The default next action is set to "Prepare for /meeting subject/" but can be modified. The deadline for the [...]
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 [...]
Getting In to Empty: Getting "IN" to empty doesn't mean actually doing all the actions and projects you'v collected. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you're going to do with it". (David Allen, Getting Things Done, Page 119).
David Allen stresses that [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
The latest version of MindReader will automatically add two new branches to your MindReader.mmap configuration file. The "delay" and "extend" branches add keyword phrases that will allow you to "delay" the start date and end date of a task or just "extend" the due date using the GyroQ "m" tag.
For example, if you [...]
This week I got an inquiry from Sigurdur on whether there was a "Hot Action" ResultsManager dashboard available. I thought it would be useful to capture the process of creating one in a blog post to review the seven steps to creating a custom ResultsManager dashboard using MindManager 7.
Sigurdur's request was [...]
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 [...]
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" [...]
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