… to graduation from the 2 year program at RIT leading to a Master’s in Product Development. The time and effort I have put in to adding content into PersonalBrain over the past 18 months is beginning to pay off. PersonalBrain has been invaluable in creating and maintaining my social network, and now I am leveraging the tool to incorporate linkages between papers and reports that we are reading for school. When you tie this information in with important concepts from 18 months of classes it all starts to come together rather nicely. What I really appreciate the most about PersonalBrain is its ability to index through PDF files, as you can imagine, I have many. I enjoy turning the Wander mode on ever so often and have PersonalBrain run through a randomized sequence of thoughts from the Brain. It is amazing how much information has been conveyed to us! It has been nothing short of trying to assimilate a barrage of information, kind of like drinking from a firehose.

I am on a well-earned break between semesters at school. I’ve recently completed my first year of a two year executive program leading to a Master’s in  Product Development at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I’ve been intensively using EverNote, MindManager Pro 6 and 7, Personal Brain, OneNote 2007 and FolderShare to capture and synchronize my class notes. I’ve also been using Scrybe, Diigo and Facebook to capture schedules, manage groups and communicate with classmates and faculty. On the analog lofi side of things I’ve been using Levenger Circa and Moleskines. I intend to post my experiences with using these tools over the course of a year and my wishes for better integration of tools to support knowledge capture and management.

I’ve been away lately, mostly because I started a part-time program at the Rochester Institute of Technology that will culminate in a Masters in Product Development. My company selected me for this two year executive program and we have class every Friday from 8am to 4:30pm. It also requires anywhere from 15-25hrs per week outside class, and put that all on top of a busy four days at work and you can see why I haven’t had much time to blog. I’ve been using Freemind 0.9.0 Beta 8 extensively to capture class notes
and outline papers. I even used it to create a dashboard for my courses (I take 2 courses per quarter) that documents the reading assignments, the graded assignments and homework etc. I’ve managed to introduce a number of my classmates to the mindmapping concept and they have taken to it.

How would you document your personal network? How far back would you go: college, high school, nursery school? How would you indicate who knows whom and in which context? How would you get this out of your head so that you could analyze the network?

These and other questions came up as I started to think about documenting my personal network. I immediately noticed that the information relating to my personal network was just “stuff” in the GTD sense. Some information was in my head. Some information was also spread across multiple sources such as numerous phone books, planners, business cards, software such as Outlook, hardware such as cell phones, computers, old Palm PDAs, my new PocketPC PDA etc. I used the In-Basket to Empty process followed my a quick
MindSweep to get a fairly detailed listing.

In my last article I presented one of the key take aways from a presentation on Social Capital, namely that we have to open ourselves to ask for assistance.

In the past, prior to the creation of the “electronic frontier” or “cyberspace” (whatever the correct moniker should be), we were relegated to seeking such assistance from people that we were colocated with in face to face conversations. We now have the ability to seek assistance electronically as well.

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a local conference where someone was speaking about  one’s “Social Capital”: who you know and what they know, as well as what people in that network are willing to do for each other. She started the presentation by asking us if we knew who we could count on in the event of an emergency: maybe a family member, a neighbor, a co-worker. As soon as she asked the question you could see the thought process playing out in the minds of the attendees as they mentally sorted
a list of potentials and rank ordered them. America is a nation on the move, and even with the advent of instant communication channels the threads of our personal networks continue to fray. Her point is it doesn’t need to be this way. The threads can be repaired and strengthened. Doing so is easier than one might imagine, but it takes time and some dedication on one’s part. The payoff according to James M. Kouzes[1] can be:

autumn leaves,
originally uploaded by slowburn.

Fall reminds me that the only constant is change. And this photo by slowburn truly captures the spirit of the season.

David Allen advocates that we conduct a periodic MindSweep to ensure that all our open loops are in a collection system and out of our head. In an interesting article in this month’s FastCompany magazine Clive Thompson profiles Gordon Bell, a Microsoft executive, who is conducting an experiment: to capture his life into digital storage. Documents, bills, email, photos, audio and video. Would this perfect recall help or hinder
our ability to identify all our open loops?

It has been nine months since I started this blog writing under the pseudonym “speaker”. The purpose of speakhead.com is to provide me with a creative outlet to write about my personal experiences as I implement tips and techniques from experts in the field of Personal Productivity.

speakhead.com is all about my personal commitment to a life-long continuous learning process to make a better “Me”, and in doing so hopefully passing on some of my passion, learning and leads to others to make a better “We”.

I’m ready to drop the pseudonym and introduce “speaker” as Salil Athalye from Pittsford, NY.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time with EverNote Plus 1.5 recently. I’m so glad that I submitted a handwriting sample and obtained a license for EverNote Plus 1.1, and even more grateful that EverNote provided free upgrades to EverNote Plus 1.5 when it was released. I haven’t played much with the new features such as PC to PC Synchronization and the ability to open multiple databases - instead I have been trying to organize my reading lists. A couple of months ago when I started using EverNote
I read an essay on how GTDWannabe uses EverNote to organize research materials. Back then I filed this information away in del.icio.us. Now I use the technique espoused in the essay of using keywords such as @get[] and implemented a rudimentary state machine to help me organize personal, academic and professional reading lists.