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.

Have a question/suggestion/problem — give it a try: http://forum.activityowner.com

1. Open ao\mindreaderconfig.mmap (or just type "o mapmap").
2. Navigate to the "dates" main topic.
3. Add a topic with text "next quarter"
4. In the the notes add – dateadd("m",3,date)

There is a new macro installed by the MindReader installer and also available on the wiki MindManager Macro Library that will do a basic syncronization of tasks between your ResultsManager Daily Action Dashboard in MindManager and your Microsoft Outlook task list.

The macro (ao_nextactions_to_outlook.mmbas) does the following:

1. Delete previosly transferred or exported items from oulook unless marked complete
2. If marked complete in outlook, run mark task complete on them in the daily action dashboard.
3. Transfer new items from Outlook into MindManager via MindReader.
4. Leave them behind as well but add "ao_transferred" into note to mark them as transferred
5. Export next actions from daily action dashboard to Outlook task list. Set basic attributes like context, due date, and priority.

Note that this is designed specifically for use with a ResultsManager Daily Action Dashboard.

This basic macro isn't smarter than described above, and will not detect changes in attributes (beyond completion) to sync back to MindManager. Attempting to do anything fancier than this is is buried deep on my GTD someday/maybe list.

I've never had much success in attempting to do this type of synchronization with other "built-in" methods. This provides some basic functionality that might be of use to those who need it.

If you want to have ready access to your next actions from outlook or your smart phone, this can be a good strategy. This also allows you to capture new actions in Outlook and feed them in. For 1-way transfers into MindManager from OutLook, OutLinker provides a more robust approach.

You can run the macro manually or incorporate into the "Put it in front of the door script" for overnight processing.

Next Action: "Waiting for reader feedback on Outlook Task Syncronization".

NAA score +0.1 :-).

• Option to pick from 5 archive folders
• Fields for up to 9 contexts and 20 tags (use for context, area, category, destination keyword, etc)
• Ability to process OutLook 2007 RSS folders
• Ability to create appointments with message as attachment
• Greatly improved ability to correctly delete Gmail IMAP messages from multiple accounts
• Macro scripts to delete, archive, mindread sets of selected messages
• Streamlined user interface

Give it a try (download).

The latest version of OutLinker has a new routine (AutoOutLinker) that you can place on your toolbar. If you select a set of messages and process them with this command, they will be sent to the selected topic in the active map.

You can install the latest version by visiting the download page. Once you have installed the program, you can add the command to your toolbar by first running the Outlinker program (to enable macros) and then selecting "Tools, Customize, Macros" and dragging the command up to your toolbar. There are also commands for directly deleting or archiving a large set of messages.

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.

A MindReader power user suggested by email…

Is it possible to add an extension to the nm tag to prompt to automatically run the k tag i.e. do you want to create a new link to a destination map – y/n?

I use nm quite a lot but often forget to go and create a new keyword as the next step and so waste my time always having to check to see if I have create a keyword before I can use it….

This is a great suggestion and has been implemented. The new version is implemented as a macro that can be run directly or using the nm GyroQ tag.

The nm tag sets up a basic ResultsManager project map in MindManager with an in-tray, reference branch, and plan branch. Destination keywords are very useful for maps you plan to utilize frequently. Once set, you can use the "o" tag to quickly open the map based on a keyword, the "s" tag to send topics from from one map to its intray, or the "q" tag to queue items in GyroQ to be sent to its in-tray.

The easiest way to install the new tag is to download and run the latest version of the . Make sure you have it overwrite your GyroQ.ini file so you get both the macro and the new tag.

You can also download the ao_new_project_map.mmbas macro from the MindManager macro library into your "My Maps\AO" directory and paste the packed text for the nm tag into GyroQ.

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,

AO

While this approach does allow you to navigate down to particular maps from the map central, it adds a fair amount of activation energy for adding a project map and often will lead you to just clutter central maps with several projects. In my experience, giving a project "elbow room" of its own map will often catalyze the process of Getting Things Done (GTD).

Did you know that instead of linking out to individual maps from your map central, you can also organize your maps by just link to a folder (e.g. "My Maps\2010") and ResultsManager will automatically process all the maps in that folder? Using the approach you can add one folder and one link for 2010 today, and then just use the GyroQ "nm" tag to quickly create new project maps as projects arise. I used this approach in 2009 and found it much easier than detailed map by map links.

Hi all,

I am using the In-tray dashboard from Gyronix' ResultManager and AOs
"In-Tray.mmbas" macro to create a map that shows a) the actions in the in trays
and b) the links to the In-Trays. This way it is easy to have direct access to
the relevant in-trays / maps and work on it during weekly review.

I now found out, that the tasks in the in-tray are not selected by this dasboard
if the already have a category assigned. The result is that topics in the in
tray and the in-tray topic itself are not shown if all the topics in the in-tray
have a category (which can easily happen when you use OutLinker and have the
possibility to easily define categories when emptying your Outlook inbox).

I have no idea on how to change the in-tray categories (in-tray* and process) or
the dashboard filter to get all topics of the in-tray in the dashboard.

Any ideas?

Many thanks and best regards

Stefan

I got some clarifications from Stefan by email to better answer this question. He is running the "ao_full_intray_projects" macro from the activityowner macro library on a modified version of the Gyronix "Sweep and Review" dashboard. The Sweep and Review dashboard looks for activities with the category "process" as an indication of them being children of an in-tray topic.

The problem is that a topic only inherits the "process" category if it doesn't have its own category assignments. In-tray items (pre-mindreader) would typically not have markup so it normally wouldn't be an issue.

Nick Dufill has a good summary of inheritance properties on his beyond mindmapping website.

I don't think there is a way to "fix" the sweep and review dashboard to get around this. Here is how I would approach getting this type of information:

First, I highly recommend making your in-trays "sub-projects" rather than activities. The main reason for this is that it allows any project lacking a next action (but having an in-tray) to show up on dashboards as a project needs a next step. The filter that looks for projects lacking next actions isn't smart enough to realize the in-tray is not actually a next action.

If you have all your in-trays as sub-projects, then it would be possible to write a macro on the daily action dashboard that looks for call-out topics attached to next actions that are in-trays. The Next Action Analysis macro does in order to penalize for letting in-trays get too full or old.

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.

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.

This is not part of the setup program yet, so in order to try it you need to copy the macro code from the wiki and paste it into "My Maps\AO\ao_attachment2link.mmbas". You can run this macro directly after selecting topics or launch it with GyroQ using the new "a2l" tag (packed text).

Users can now send outlook messages to maps by checking the "attachment" option in OutLinker and then thin out maps later using the code above. This is hot off the press so proceed with caution and report any bugs.

Whether you are following Habit 2 of the Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or the "Next Action" mindset of Getting things done (GTD), is all about learning to identify and break down the sequence of individual steps to get from point A to point B.

I spend most of my time interfacing with capture tools (GyroQ or OutLinker), processing the input through MindReader, and then using Next Action Analysis to review and prioritize activities harvested from MindManager by ResultsManager. For better or worse, I actually spend relatively little time planning in the underlying project maps themselves.

This works fairly well with one exception. I typically only capture the "next action" associated with an idea or email. If it is not linked to a project or subsequent action and is subsequently marked complete from a dashboard, I sometimes forget to enter the subsequent step and risk having the project fall off my radar.

The latest version of MindReader can help address this issue with its new capability for it to recognize and process sequences of activities separated by << or >> delimiters. For example, you can now use the << delimiter to enter a sequence starting at the end:


which yields:

or you can use the >> delimiter to enter the sequence of actions starting with the next action and leading to the final action or project:

which yields:

MindReader processes each portion of the sequence separately based on keywords in each activity, so if you enter:

Report Complete isproject next month! << Review draft << Waiting for Bob to draft report << Ask Bob to write report tomorrow

you get:

You can use this functionality from the MindReader q or b tags or from OutLinker. I think it has a lot of potential uses that I haven't thought of yet. For example, you could conceive of having a library of "template" sequences that you queue in as needed for routine work flows.

You can download the new functionality by grabbing the ao_mindreader_common.mmbas macro from the macro library or running the setup program.

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).

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.

A : close the list with participant :x – 12
B : make syllaby with names participants x- 10
C : confirm participants and give them iternary x -7
D : workshop : x
E : demand feedback x+2

This need has come up a few times in the context of enhancing Mark Task Complete by allowing it to recycle full projects instead of just tasks. While that is a bit challenging, doing the above from a fresh template is much more do-able as a Saturday morning crossword puzzle problem.

The easiest way to implement this was to use Johan's syntax X-2, X+10 as a task category for the desired topics. The X should be capitalized and there should be no spaces (e.g. use "X+2" not "x + 2"). You can do these markups using the MindReader m tag:



and then either save this map as a template or use "save as" from master map to create particular projects maps.

For a particular project, you would then run the new "ao_set_relative_date.mmbas" macro and enter the reference "X" date:

which yields:


.

The "next action" on this would probably be to have a syntax for setting start dates as well as a way to avoid false positives on categories that happen to have a capital X in them. You need to save the macro into a file from the wiki for now as it hasn't been rolled in to Setup program yet.

To install it, paste the "packed text" for the tag into GyroQ.

OutLinker and OutLinker Lite now automatically detect conversation threads and allow you to navigate across them using the "nt" (next in thread) and "pt" (previous in thread) buttons. You can now also ThreadZoom(TM) your selection to focus on just the messages in the thread. You can "UnZoom" back to the full list as needed or wait for OutLinker to automatically "UnZoom" once you have whittled the thread down to one message.