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 [...]
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 [...]
This is almost too embarrassing to post. Working with MindReader this afternoon while doing my GTD weekly review, I noticed the script was running a bit sluggishly while processing items. I decided to go into the SAX basic code and see if I could speed it up a bit. I made [...]
Based on reader feedback, one of the more popular GyroQ hacks on ActivityOwner.Com is the Put it in front of the Door script that enables you to setup your computer to automatically unload your GyroQ queue and refresh your ResultsManager dashboards each morning.
The new ResultsManager Ribbon-interface that Gyronix created for MindManager 7 makes it [...]
While reviewing my ResultsManager Daily Actions Plus Dashboard in MindManager this evening, I noticed I had accumulated quite a few "next actions" in the "no context" branch. This branch has usually be relatively lean since I began using MindReader heavily. Putting things in context is a key aspect of GTD.
I [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Kelly Forrester posted a new pod-cast she did with David Allen on the difficulty people have with the idea of not being able to link their next-actions back to projects easily. David rightly points out that if you are in the hardware store, you are much better off reviewing your next action list [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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). [...]
The QuickTime video loop below shows the GyroQ MindReader "process current topics" ("c") tag acting on selected MindManager topics. Based on the keyword matches the macro sees in the user's MindReader configuration map, it performs a GTD "process" step by setting the activity context, due dates, icons, priorities, category, area, resources, etc. [...]
The most popular post on the ActivityOwner.com site is an early review of the pre-release version of GyroQ. The “Top Twenty Uses for GyroQ?” blog entry speculates on how users might ultimately choose to populate the 20 tag slots the software provides. Since that time, the Activityowner.com tag library has accumulated over [...]
Last week's post on "GyroParser-let GyroQ read your mind" demonstrated an initial proof of concept of a GyroQ tag for parsing the text of an action item to try to infer the destination map for it, its due date, its context, and the relationships (e.g. waiting for, owed to, contact about) associated with it. [...]
"Buy eggs tomorrow!"
"Call Bob next week",
"Read Getting Things Done someday"
Longtime ActivityOwner.com readers may remember an early post that speculated about the possibility of having GyroQ parse the text of an action item to automatically infer things like context. due date, priority, etc. This could act as a time saver, allow one tag to [...]
The recent "Put it in Front of the Door" post described the use of GyroQ and the Windows scheduler to automatically refresh a set of Gyronix ResultsManager dashboards using the GyroActivator language. On a related note, a recent post on the Yahoo GTD_MindManager forum inquired about the possibility of adding a MindManager menu [...]
If you were away from your MindManager maps for the holidays, you might have missed having ready-access to your ResultsManager "next actions" lists. While having your lists with you is a canonical GTD prerequisite, you can often get away without mobile copies if you spend most of your time in the context of [...]
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