David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology provides a 5-step methodology to process and filter input into the the trash, "waiting for" lists, delegations, ticklers, calendars, plans and next actions lists.

But here is the problem.

If you are processing 100+ inputs per day, then you are processing 3000 inputs per month and over 36,000 per year. IF your methodology works 99.9% of the time in separating the wheat from the chaff, after a year of GTD you accumulate 36 items that take up space on your project and task lists. These are the items have developed antibiotic resistance to your methodology. The triple-digit ages of the tasks are the first give away – "What part of someday/maybe don't you understand?" Unfortunately many of these tasks are typically the "someday I really should/have-to" items.

A few dozen stale items may not seem like a lot, but it doesn't take much to take the vitality out of your next action lists. A next action list is most effective if you can chew through it like a three course meal rather than snack on it like a buffet.

In my experience, a good "GTD" day might involve knocking off 15 items from your list. You probably do a lot more than that, but many items are immediate or 2-minute actions that don't flow into the system. If you are knocking off 15 items, then a 100-item list is about 7 days of activity. If your 100 item list has 36 stale/"overdue" items that cause you to avert your eyes, your are not going to make as much progress on the vital ones. Even when you do make good progress, it will involve knocking your 100 item list down to 85. That doesn't feel like a lot of progress. What you typically end up with are a few fresh items (0-3 days old) flowing through a swamp of aging tasks.

I developed the Next Action Analysis system as a way to try to keep vitality in my lists with mixed success. When I checked my home lists a few weeks ago, I found that I had only 60 next actions, but over half were over two months old and 12 were over 6 months old. While I generally practice strategies for dealing with aging tasks (see fire the oldest 10% of your tasks), the antibiotic resistant strains had accumulated. I also had several projects with a waiting-for task that had gone stale.

I got an Ipad 2 this summer and was experimenting with syncing dashboards over to it using DropBox, but decided to use the occasion to try a different track.

I declared GTD bankruptcy.

There are a number of ways one might go about this. I decided to start from scratch in a (gasp) different GTD software package. This forced me to go through the "Chapter 11" process of entering in my projects and tasks from scratch. I would guess that folks that adopt paper-based GTD systems fare a bit better in keeping their stale items at bay through the process of transcribing them. You can do this without changing your system by just printing everything out and then working selected items back into an empty system.

This process facilitated some renegotiation with myself on some aging tasks. One example stale item was "reconcile credit card transactions in Quicken". In practice, changing this to "reconcile end of year credit card balance with placeholder transaction" was really sufficient. In the end, most of my "committed" tasks have migrated over, but a sizeable chunk of my stale tasks have been renegotiated or dropped. I'm surprised this concept isn't common out there in the GTD venacular beyond an entry from Penelope Trunk.

I'll review the software I migrated my home GTD system to as well as a new add-in that brings the content back to MindManager for visualization and next action analysis in future blog entries.

Related posts:

1. 2008 GTD Challenge Results
2. Six Components of a GTD Review
3. Fire the oldest 10% of your tasks

Related posts:

1. New Blogs
2. What is the Next Action for ActivityOwner.Com?
3. Here's how I use MindReader in Practice

After using this new feature for a bit, I found that having just 12 keywords accessible via the mouse wasn't so helpful, as I found I had to switch over to the keyboard and "mindreader" dialog for the less used keywords I couldn't fit on the ribbon. Reflecting on this I realized the ~40 keyword markup options provided by OutLinker was probably closer to what I needed day to day marking up tasks and projects for my MindManager maps.

This morning over an early breakfast I added a new floating form that gives you 40 configurable buttons that you can use for whatever MindReader keywords you like. You launch the form (pictured below) by hitting the "markup" button on the MindReader tab. To configure the buttons, you just need to check the "click to configure" box at the bottom of the form.

Hopefully the add-in is stabilizing now and I can spend more time Getting Things Done (GTD) than programming!

Related posts:

1. Buttons to send topics to other maps
2. OutLinker Contexts
3. New MindReader features: the "m" tag and explicit context

First comes Black Friday, then Cyber Monday, and then GTD Sunday, the first Sunday after the new year when GTDers try to climb back onto their systems and do a reasonable weekly (or yearly) review.

The key to successfully using ResultsManager for GTD is to always have the output of an up to date Daily Action dashboard at your fingertips. One the best things you can do to achieve that is implement the "Put it in front of the door" scripts for scheduling regular dashboard refreshes and for emailing your context lists to you email account and smart phone. I hope to put out another blog post on that "someday" soon. I'm also hoping to summarize the steps needed to get Outlinker working with OutLook 2010. If you have questions on either of these topics just post a comment anywhere and I can try to help.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a new trick I've been working on to facillitate faster mid-day dashboard regeneration. Coming into this exercise my home dashboard refresh time was about 4:25 on a fairly fast 64bit desktop. My work laptop dashboard refresh was over 7 minutes when disconnected from the large network of shared group maps and probably on the order of 10-15minutes when connected (I didn't have a chance to time yet). For me, those wait times are just a bit too long and discourage me from doing the map mark up neccessary to clarify my priorities and commitments mid-day if I haven't had the dashboard automatically refreshed (particularly on my laptop).

On my home system, ResultsManager was scanning 1459 Activities found in 4267 Topics spread over 191 MindManager maps it needed to scan. You can check your situation by looking at the notes of the central topic of your daily action dashboard. Many folks probably don't have that many maps, but many are probably working on slower computers and also face the daunting wait for dashboard refreshes.

It occurred to me that after having used ResultsManager for several years, my active next actions were probably only coming from a small subset of the maps being scanned. I occasionally use the Multimap checker to remove some completed maps from the network of maps scanned and to clean up broken links and wanted to take that further to see what could be accomplished.

As it turns out, my home dashboard is only drawing active projects and next actions from 37 (20%) of the 191 maps being scanned. By generating a temporary map central that points just to those 37 maps, I found I could cut my dashboard refresh time down from over 4 minutes down to 1:40. On my un-docked work system, it reduced refresh time from 7:15 to 4:50. I anticipate a much larger docked improvement.

Gyronix may be able to leverage this strategy into future versions (I've shared the idea with them), but in the meantime, I will walk you through the steps I went through to achieve this and the new macro needed to identify the active maps.

1. Generate a daily action dashboard from your main map central and time how long it takes and note how many maps are being scanned.

2. Copy and past the text from the new macro "ao_tempmapcentral.mmbas" from the MindManager Macro Library into a text editor and save it into your "My Maps\AO" directory. If you are reading this I'm guessing you have already used some of the tools on the side and have that directory. If not, just download the "ao_common.mmbas" file and put it in same directory you save this macro into. I haven't put this into the setup program yet.

3. Open your daily action dashboard and remove the "In-tray branch. The intrays will lead back to inactive maps. You may want to just remove this branch from the dashboard template permanently if you don't make active use of it. To do this, just open your daily action dashboard, click on ResultsManager tab and "open template". Delete the in-tray branch and then save and close the template. While you have it open, you may want to add %time% to the central topic so you can see when you last refreshed the dashboard.

4. Run the macro on daily action dashboard. It will create a new map (My Maps\tempmapcentral.mmap) and generate a minimal set of links to point out to the maps that are active in your dashboard today. You don't want to use this temporary map central long term as new tasks with future start dates may become active on maps it skips over.

5. You can generate a daily action dashboard on this map and will likely see some speed improvement. Give it a try. Unfortunately what you will likely see is that ResultsManager will end up scanning more maps than listed there due to links from these maps out to inactive maps.

6. In order to avoid ResultsManager from searching these inactive maps, you need to next run the ResultsManager multimap checker on the temp map central. This will provide a picture of where ResultsManager is going. Make sure you check the option for "Show maps with completed projects".

7. Filter the map using the Power Filter to focus in on the maps that are done. Create a subdirectory called "done" whereever they are and move them there. That will break the link to them from whereever ResultsManager is finding them and give you a sense of accomplishment.

8. Filter the map for broken links and fix or remove them. This is just good housekeeping and probably speeds things up a bit as well.

9. Filter the maps for the "is referenced more than once" marker and track down the maps that are being linked to from multiple places. This will eliminate need for ResultsManager to have to deal with the extra links and help with the next step.

10. This is the big one. Ideally you want the network of maps that shows up in Multimap checker report on your temporary map central to be only 1 layer deep. You don't want ResultsManager's search to leak out to networks of inactive maps based on a link in one of the active maps. You want to track down these links and block them with stop icon or remove them. In order to do that, but still have them be found when you do a full dashboard refresh, you need to make sure they can be found from your map central. The strategy I adopted last year for that was to move away from using map specific hyperlinks but instead to link to folders from my map central. Even though I'd been doing this for a couple of years, the legacy "area map centrals" I had set up in my early years had lots of map links. In some cases I just created "My Maps\2011\area" folders and moved lots of legacy maps into them to be sure I didn't loose connections to them.

11. Repeat steps 4-7 until you get a temporary map central that yields a Multimap checker map that only goes one layer deep.

12. Generate a new daily action dashboard using the temporary map central and see what improvement you get compared to step 1 (and report in comments below).

I'd recommend you run the Next Action Analysis script on your resulting Daily Action dashboard to see what it recommends you do next. Note that you want to regenerate a full "Daily Action" dashboard every couiple of days to ensure any newly active maps are captured. We will need to explore how to make this more user friendly with scripts.

Note that you should run through the ResultsManager setup tips as well to make sure you have

Best wishes for a successful 2011!

Related posts:

1. MindManager Housekeeping with the ResultsManager Multi-Map Checker
2. Dashboard Refresh Speed Comparison
3. Focusing in on One Area of your Life

I believe that certain creative/semi-ADD personality types are highly drawn to the use of GTD and MindManager for getting organized. The approaches and the tools can take a situation like this and help define a constructive and creative path forward when faced with a daunting problem. I thought it might be use this episode as a case study to share how I use the tools and along the way get reader input and collaboration on solutions.

This issue clearly isn't a "two minute action" and doesn't seem like something I can delegate, defer, or "trash", so it's a "project". If I was very busy at the moment and I was becoming aware on the issue via an OutLook email message, I would just use Outlinker on a email related to it and send the email into my GyroQ queue with an "isproject" keyword so that it would show up later in my dashboards as a project needing a next action to be defined. If the next action were clear I might include the first step as well using the << operator. In this case I know this is going to be a drawn out project that will require a dedicated map, so I'll toggle to the MindReader "nm" tag (new map tag) by hitting Control-Q to bring up GyroQ and then typing "nm" to toggle to the nm tag to set up a project map for it.

The first step is "To begin with the end in mind", and describe an ambitious desired outcome: "GTD tools working well with MindManager 9 next month"

I'll also tack on some quick markup using Mindreader keywords to set this as a priority 3 project I own in the "blog" area of my life:

"GTD tools working well with MindManager 9 next month [R:AO P3 blog]"

When I hit enter, the tag will first prompt me for where to save the map. I'll save it in my 2010\blog folder so that it will be automatically picked up by my map central link to that folder when I run dashboards.

The tag next prompts for what the next action is for the project. In this case I will take a convenient short cut and define the next step as "Brainstorm next steps and subprojects for MM9 compatibility".

Finally, the tag prompts as to whether I want to assign a keyword to the project map. Because this will likely be around for awhile and I anticipate needing to send ideas and email messages into the map, I'll assign a keyword that comes to mind "mm9project".

Now anything I send to MindManager with GyroQ or OutLinker will be directed to the in-tray of this map if I include the text mm9project, and the keyword will automatically be removed once processed.

In order to remind myself get back to this soon, I'll use the "m" tag to set the target date for the brainstorming as "next week" and I'm left with map below.

Coming Next: Part 2 — Brainstorming

Ideally we'd brainstorm together on a collaborative map using Catalyst, but I don't have an account set up that I could use, so if you have ideas on how to proceed, what needs to be done, subprojects, solutions, etc., just shout them out in comments below and I'll include in my brainstorming map. Remember 1st rule of brainstorming — don't judge others ideas.

See next entry in series: MindManager Project Management Part 2 — Brainstorming.

Related posts:

1. Import BaseCamp project information into MindManager
2. MindManager Project Management Part 4 — Project Planning
3. Set Relative Due Dates on a Project Map Template

You could use the next actions by area and context dashboard template in the way you describe but I would recommend a simpler approach (and minimize the risk of you falling into the rabbit hole of custom dashboard tweaking).

The workaround I would use for this is to follow the map central strategy I described earlier this year but go one step further and put the maps you care about in this area in 2010\AreaX.

Then create a map central that points only to that folder (or run dashboards on just that branch of a more general map central). That will enable you to use a vanilla daily action or review dashboard as is. The "Next Action Analysis" script run on daily action in this way will give you several breakdown lists (tasks by priority, time available, projects by priority, etc) that can be used instead of generating a separate custom dashboard to get them. The m2t (map2table) tag/macro run on these branches can give a nice tabular view of things.

Make sure you move any relevant items from your general daily capture map to a map in this folder first.

Related posts:

1. Building a Custom ResultsManager Dashboard
2. Committed Projects and Next Actions
3. Creating a ResultsManager Dashboard Template

You can watch the video of the webinar here.

It has also been added as a link on the wiki ResultsManager Resources page.

Related posts:

1. MindJet GyroQ Webinar
2. GyroQ MindReader Video Clip
3. GyroQ Webinar Replay

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.

Related posts:

1. MindManager Housekeeping with the ResultsManager Multi-Map Checker
2. Focusing in on One Area of your Life
3. Mapping your Maps

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.

Related posts:

1. Outlinker GUI
2. OutLinker Lite (OutLinker for "list" people)
3. GTDT (Getting Things Done Together)

Ironically, in developing and sharing a framework on how she might deal the fact that her greatest success may be behind her in the form of previous book "Eat, Pray, Love", she perhaps achieves a greater one. Procrastinate a bit and hear what she has to say…

My favorite quote – "I would please like the record to show today that I showed up today for my part of the job"

Related posts:

1. GTDT (Getting Things Done Together)
2. GTD Audio
3. Upcoming ResultsManager Webinar

Note that the contexts assigned with the buttons (or by just putting the @context in the next action) are now automatically set as the category if you choose to send the task to your Microsoft Outlook task list. This is particularly useful for OutLinker Lite users who are not yet working with MindManager or ResultsManager. OutLinker also recognizes some common "context verbs" and sets an associated context.

The text associated with the "context" buttons can be fully customized under the Options menu and can be re-purposed if desired to set different mindreader keywords (e.g. destination map keyword, alias).

Related posts:

1. OutLinker Lite (OutLinker for "list" people)
2. What are your next action verbs?
3. ButtonReader: 40 configurable buttons for MindReader

A picture is worth a thousand words. If you have been on the sidelines, give OutLinker a try. Make sure you grab the latest version of MindReader to take full advantage of it.

A big thanks to all the victims beta testers of the new form-based version developed over the last few months.

Related posts:

1. OutLinker Installer Now Available
2. OutLinker 2.0
3. OutLinker Setup Gets Easier and New Attachment Feature

The program was recently enhanced with the option to create Outlook tasks with message attachments and/or links. It occurred to me that this tool might be useful to non-MindManager users. OutLinker Lite is a new version of OutLinker that removes dependencies and options related to MindManager and focuses on creating OutLook tasks. As time goes on, more "MindReader" functionality can be added to mark up those tasks in a manner similar to what is done in MindReader.

If you are an OutLinker power user, you might have a friend give "OutLinker Lite" a try. If you are not a MindManager user, but are suffering from a full inbox and struggling to avoid exceeding your Exchange quota, this could be a useful tool for you.

Related posts:

1. ThreadZoom
2. Synchronizing MindManager and OutLook
3. OutLinker Contexts

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:

1. 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.

2. MindRead: Send to MindManager immediately with destination determined by MindReader
3. Send to Actve Map: Sends immediately to the subtopic of the currently selected topic. This 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.
4. 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?

Related posts:

1. Outlinker GUI
2. Synchronizing MindManager and OutLook
3. Four ways to add tasks to your maps from your phone

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.

Related posts:

1. OutLink to your OutLook Task List and other new options
2. OutLinker Installer Now Available
3. OutLinker Setup Gets Easier and New Attachment Feature

Related posts:

1. SpeedReader — Faster Version of MindReader Available
2. Mapping the MindReader Configuration Map
3. map2wiki — Convert MindManager Maps to wiki format

An installation program was one of the main requests coming out of the OutLinker Survey. The survey suggested that while OutLinker has a very small user base (perhaps just a couple of dozen users) , those users are seeing large benefits with the typical user processing about 5000 email messages over the past several months with it.

Hopefully this new installation program will enable a broader range of users to give the program a try. Note that although the defaults assume you are using the program with GyroQ and MindReader, you can configure it for use without these and just transfer items directly to MindManager. The simple hyperlinks generated by this program are cleaner and more compact that those created by MindManager's built in tools.

The latest version of the program has a trimmed down interface (above) that is placed in the top right of the screen so that the message you are processing can be more easily read. If you need to interact with the message (e.g. to scroll), just use the "i" command. At the bottom of the interface are statistics about how many messages you have processed today, how many are left in the current selection, and how long it is taking you to move through them. The program now also keeps track of how many times you skip each message.

Ideally you practice good GTD and only handle things once, but if you do find yourself falling off the GTD wagon and skipping over messages, this field can be handy. You can add this field to your inbox column headings by clicking right on the heading, choosing "Field Chooser" and the selecting "user defined fields in inbox". If your inbox is swamped, you can identify the messages you haven't given a 1st pass review to as well as the ones that you are dancing around by sorting on this field. Note that you can bypass the GyroQ queue and move message directly to active maps using the "s2am" keyword. This can be handy when are working with groups of messages on a particular topic that you are trying to sort out.

Related posts:

1. Outlinker GUI
2. OutLinker Lite (OutLinker for "list" people)
3. Auto OutLinker

With this changes my "m tag" processing of a ResultsManager dashboard item dropped from 10 seconds to less than 2 seconds.

If you are a frequent MindReader user, you will want to download the latest Beta setup.exe and upgrade. Note that the wiki has links to a "Beta" and "stable" version. I move the "beta" to "stable" when it survives a week or two without changes. Often the new "beta" will be the less buggy of the two, but it will occasionally (OK often) have unanticipated issues. This way the user can fall back to the other if a problem emerges with one of them.

I also found several attributes that were not being sent to the underlying maps when MindReader marked up dashboard maps using the m tag. If you haven't upgraded recently, make sure your also overwrite your GyroQ.ini file with the updated version so that the unneeded "sendchanges" command in earlier versions of the m tag are removed.

Related posts:

1. Mark Tasks Complete Faster
2. Faster MindReader Tags
3. Speed Reader

Jose Miguel Bolivar, an ActivityOwner.com power user who guest blogged on how he uses MindReader in practice back in January, has established a leading Spanish language blog on GTD called Optima Infinito. There is a handy Google translate widget on the sidebar that will let you read the blog in the language of your choice.

Related posts:

1. A Configurable GyroQ Tag for Parsing Action Items
2. MindManager 7 Setup Tip
3. José Miguel Bolívar on using ResultsManager and MindReader

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.

Related posts:

1. Mark Task Complete Update
2. Mark Task Complete Updated
3. SpeedReader — Faster Version of MindReader Available

All these changes have been rolled into AO-Pack, except for the outlinker updates.

MindReader

• Make sure you are using GyroQ 1.9.4.7. MindReader does not work with 1.9.4.9.
• You can automatically remove markup like "next week" or "isproject" (and avoid need to put in brackets), by toggling to the "m" tag and typing "setoption:autodelete:1"
• There is a new "nm" tag in the tag library that generates reads a string to create a new project map with in-tray, reference, and plan branches and markup based on the provided string.
• MindJet connect compatibility added

Mark Task Complete

• The macro now "chirps" when it completes its work so it is easier to avoid causing problems by moving on to other activities before it is done.
• The macro now defaults to the new option of storing completed tasks in a branch under the parent project rather than to a floating "complete" topic.
• MindJet connect compatibility added.

Next Action Analysis

• Overdue projects are now listed separately and overdue tasks inheriting their status from the project are left off the "past target" list. This aspect still needs some tweaking, but it is generally much easier to adjust the project dates than deal with the potentially long list of tasks that are just inheriting their status.
• The macro now automatically brings up an advice page for your weakest score attribute. Please add to the advice on the page if you have insights on how to improve.

Outlinker

• Outlinker has new commands to reply to and save messages (rs, ras).
• A "s2am" keyword is now recognized in outlinker that lets you send a task with link to current message immediately to the active map instead of to the GyroQ queue. This can be useful if you are working with a set of messages related to a project that you want to organize immediately.
• Adding a copy of the message as a topic note is now optional.
• The OutLinker dialog box now has a timer that tells you how quickly you are processing your tasks.

Related posts:

1. New MindReader features: the "m" tag and explicit context
2. Next Action Analysis Updated
3. A different approach to marking tasks complete

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.

Related posts:

1. Map2Table — Export your map branches to a linked web page table
2. Putting Things in Context
3. Focusing in on One Area of your Life

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,

AO

Related posts:

1. 2008 GTD Challenge Results
2. Next Action Analysis 2008 GTD Challenge
3. Logging Next Action Analysis Results

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

Related posts:

1. Next Action Analysis Updated
2. Next Action Analysis: 5 Metrics for Assessing your GTD System
3. Next Action Analysis 2008 GTD Challenge

… 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.

Related posts:

1. Six Components of a GTD Review
2. GTD Phone Home
3. 2008 GTD Challenge Results