First Weekly Review with MindMap
In my last article I discussed how I was planning on incorporating a mindmap into my Weekly Review. Rather than maintaining the list of Projects and Someday/Maybes as Tasks in Outlook, I’m looking into maintaining this information in a FreeMind mindmap. This past Friday I had my first opportunity to see whether there were any efficiencies gained.
If you’ve been reading my progress, you’ll recall that I use Outlook and a PocketPC PDA as the “trusted system”. So, what happened when I threw in YAT (Yet Another Tool) into the fray? I’ll describe the changes that I noticed, and draw a quick bead on whether this is helping or hurting…
I codified a personal version of David Allen’s Incompletion Trigger List as a mindmap and had a hardcopy available during the review. I also printed a hardcopy of my mindmap. From this point I entered my standard routine as documented in the article by David Allen titled “The Weekly Review”[1]. David has described these process steps:
- Loose Papers
- Process Notes
- Review Previous Calendar Data
- Review Upcoming Calendar
- Empty Your Head
- Review Action Lists
- Review Waiting For List
- Review Project (and Larger Outcome) List
- Review any Relevant Checklists
- Review Someday/Maybe List
- Be Creative and Courageous
Loose Papers
Process Notes
I’ve set a personal goal to end each day with a minimal amount of loose papers. I never want to go back to managing (or trying to manage) stacks of paper. Never. When I have access to FreeMind, I can manipulate the mindmap and quickly annotate Project and Someday/Maybe items. What do I do when I can’t pull up the mindmap? I make notes, then process them daily and file reference materials.
Review Previous Calendar Data
Review Upcoming Calendar
The Calendar is still in Outlook, so there was no change due to the addition of the mindmap.
Empty Your Head
Using Outlook I set to the Tasks View and just enter in the entries in a rapid-fire style. I’m scanning topics on the Incompletion Trigger List to do due diligence. At this point I’m not thinking about categorizing new items. This takes all of one mouse click to set focus and one enter key for each item.
I eventually make a second pass at the new items and process each one. That’s when the fun starts. Outlook does not support hierarchical tasks. My list might have a number of items that logically are next action steps for a Project, and some items may be part of a multi-level Project. Using the Notes field to capture this information requires a lot of effort to get this information organized.
Using a mindmap I can create an “uncategorized” node and in a similar rapid-fire style begin to enter in new items. So far there is no benefit to using the mindmap. Here is the big win: it is so much easier to process the list in a mindmap than in Outlook. Task heirarchies can be built by simple drag and drop operations. Multi-level projects can be constructed through color coding, text formatting and other visual or descriptive approaches. Once I have the information processed, I can determine what nodes need to move to Someday/Maybe (drag and drop entire sub-trees), I can provide an implied prioritization by reordering the nodes. Next action steps become evident as terminal nodes.
I tried this method and it helped me organize the output of my mindsweep far more effectively than trying to do the same task in Outlook. The only downside: how to get this information back into Outlook.
More on that later…
References
[1] The Weekly Review, Articles By David Allen
This free article is available for download as a PDF file.
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