Less than 6 months left…
… 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.
MindManager Professional has also played a significant role in the classroom. I’m a visual person - I found it so much easier to take notes in class and develop my thoughts for papers as MindMaps. The ability to quickly move and connect ideas on a MindMap makes it easy to capture connections between other ideas. EverNote Plus has been used a great deal, along with Diigo, where my teammates and I created our own group to share web-based secondary research.
With respect to GTD, the time I put in to practicing this methodology has paid dividends, but the way I use it today is so vastly different than 2 years ago. In early 2006, like many other bloggers writing about GTD tools, I would spend a great deal of time working through various toolsets to figure out which one would work best for me. My workload was pretty typical. When I started school in November of that year, everything changed. My time management and prioritization skills were really put to the test. Family, Work and School. Feeling like I was on a perpetual treadmill with little respite. Late hours at night and early risings. Trying to excel at all three all the time. Where GTD really helped me, although I must admit that it took a little longer than I expected, was to align myself to my professed priorities: Family first, then Work and then School. Once I got comfortable with the priorities I found that it was really much easier to truly devote myself to the task at hand without feeling the guilt associated with not putting in “the time” towards the other areas. Now, it is second nature, but I’ve reached this level of proficiency by incorporating wisdom from other sources. I found great peace in Yoga, in Eckhart Tolle’s books “The Power of Now” and “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” and in Margaret Wheatley’s writings in “Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time”. These by no means were part of the academic program, but they came into my life in the same way that GTD did two years ago - by happenstance, coincidence, sheer luck or something more? With the support of my wife, I took some spare cycles to invest in these readings and my Yoga practice in order to bring balance back to my life - and it has helped me find the energy and attention to do my best for these priorities. Just yesterday I came across a Stanford University commencement address by Steve Jobs where he talked about pursuing his passions, even though they did not seem at the time to have any linkage. He said something to the effect that you cannot connect the dots looking into the future, it can only be done when you look at the past. I’ve come to agree with his point of view: I can’t tell right now whether the time and effort spent using PersonalBrain, MindManager Pro, EverNote, GTD or reading Tolle and Wheatley are part of a strategic plan. I think it will, but Time will tell.
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