… 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’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.

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?

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.

Currently Google Calendar only supports notification for the Primary Calendar. I tried to implement the notion of facets to a Hard Landscape implemented in Google Calendar. I created secondary calendars for the major aspects that I wanted to track on the Hard Landscape. The ability to hide a subset of the calendars is very useful during a Daily or Weekly Review. Unfortunately the current limitation means that appointments from the secondary calendars do not show up on your daily agenda, and you don’t get notification.

I’ve developed a notation for capturing Next Actions. Projects and Someday/Maybes in an analog/digital GTD implementation. I call this notation nano: Next Action NOtation. In nano the trusted system is primarily analog, relying on a digital implementation to support notification such as ticklers and alarms for scheduled items on the Hard Landscape.

There are many well documented analog notations that are in the public domain. Matthew Cornell, in an article written for www.diyplanner.com entitled “Four Planner Hacks for Paper-Based Productivity” has outlined one. In a previous article on speakhead.com I offered “13
powerful precepts for an analog GTD notation.” These were based on an iterative development of nano.

Well, it has been about two months since I started my Analog Deep Dive experiment, and so I have accumulated a fair amount of mileage with an analog GTD implementation to begin to comment about my personal experiences.

An ideal analog notation for managing GTD lists ought to embody the following design precepts:

1. Succinct Notation

A notation should be succinct enough that it not command a premium on the real-estate of your planning system.

2. Ease of entry into trusted system

A notation should enable the user to quickly jot down the pertinent details of an item and come back later to annotate the entry.

3. State Transition Model

A notation should have a supporting state transition model with visual cues.

4. Upstream and Downstream traceability