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.

MindJet has provided a link to the David Allen webcast as well as the mind maps used during the presentation. These can be accessed on the David Allen website as well.

Technorati Tags: Freemind, GTD, Mind Mapping

Yesterday  I had the opportunity to listen to David Allen speak about his use of Mind Mapping using MindJet’s Mind Manager. The webcast was sponsored by MindJet and broadcast by WebEx. David spoke for about an hour and covered many examples and situations where he uses Mind Maps. MindJet will have the transcripts of the webcast along with example mindmaps available for download shortly. I’ll update this note with the links when they become
available.

On a related note, a test version of FreeMind 9.0 is available for download. I installed it yesterday and have just started playing with it. The Wiki explains the new features.