Next Actions to Go (farther)
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 another application.
As much as I like the tag, I find I don’t use it nearly as much as I should. Why? I’m guessing it is a combination of (1) needing a few more steps to open an application to print it from or a web form to mail it and (2) some aversion to seeing a few “cringe factor” action items hanging on my list.
To address #1, I took my new found familiarity with MindManager macros and added a line of code to the “cna” tag that writes the clipboard to a nextactions.txt file in the default MindManager directory and launches notepad.exe to view the file.
This additional code:
f=GetPath(mmDirectoryMyMaps)&”nextactions.txt”
Open f For Output As #1
Write #1, Clipboard
Close #1
Shell(“notepad.exe “&f,1)
pops this up in front of you:
This removes all the barriers to reviewing the list and leaves just one step to hit print or paste into email. Once I see the action items laid out in a simple list, I often can quickly find quite a few that can be checked off easily or are already done. These might have otherwise been hidden in a collapsed map branch like “contact about”. The content remains on the clipboard for easy pasting to another application.
You can installed the updated “cna” tag by pasting its packed text into the GyroQ dialog box (make sure you have extended tags enabled). I’ll likely tack this code onto the end of my personal “Put it in front of the door” script so I wake up to a nice plain text list of next actions.
Entries 
Mike Wilkerson said,
March 5, 2007 @ 2:04 pm
Wow! This was one I was going to write! Glad you did it first :-)
Dale said,
March 5, 2007 @ 8:15 pm
Neat macro. I had to edit one line of code to make it work for me:
I changed
{map:open:’dashboards/dailyactions’;
to
{map:open:’my dashboards\dailyactions’;
My Dashboards are in the “My Dashboards” folder, and I think the forward slash needs to be a backslash.
Mark Hollander said,
October 26, 2007 @ 8:37 pm
Sorry if this has been answered before (searched with the nice custom google tool). How do I amend the code to allow me authenticate with the outgoing smtp server? it needs username@domain.com and password. Thanks!
ActivityOwner said,
October 29, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
Hi Mark — I made some edits to enable it to work with authentication. See comment thread here:
http://www.activityowner.com/2007/03/06/youve-got-mailfrom-resultsmanager/#comment-7759