… 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.

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.

GTDWannabe has over twenty posts detailing how she uses EverNote to implement GTD. I also found a site (that she no longer maintains) that has a set of templates that she and other developers on the EverNote forum have implemented. I downloaded the SystemProject and SystemWeeklyReview templates
and spent some time transcribing Projects and their associated Next Actions from Freemind into EverNote.

I’ve been using this following analog/digital, lofi/hifi combination as my GTD setup:

• Outlook for email, next actions and the hard landscape
• Freemind to capture Projects and Someday/Maybes as well as to do some brainstorming
• File folders for analog information
• DIY Levenger Circa / Rollabind notebook for must-have hardcopies
• Cornell Notes template from D*I*Y Planner that are filed in the notebook using the Circa punch
• 3×5 cards using the D*I*Y Planner templates that are filed in the notebook using the Circa punch

And now for the latest entry… EverNote Plus.

This week I had the opportunity to complete a lofi GTD Weekly Review in the analog domain. I’ve never thought of the terms “LoFi” and “Analog” as perjoratives - I have great respect for people who invent and use these techniques and technologies. Anyway, my new laptop had a defective power supply that took out the mainboard, battery and a bit of my hard disk so I’ve been without a computer for a couple of days. Everything important could be retrieved from servers and backups, and I had my recently synced my PocketPC PDA to guide me through the day. If you’ve been following my personal journey with GTD you’d already know that I use FreeMind to capture my Projects and Someday/Maybes. I had a hardcopy available, so that was not an issue either.

Last week, I wrote a three part article[1] on my first attempt at integrating a mindmap into my Weekly Review process. At that time I said, “My current thought, after one Weekly review using a mindmap, is to completely manage Projects and Someday/Maybes in a mindmap and to only transfer next actions into Outlook and thus into the PDA.” In concluding that article I opined, “What I can say after one iteration, is that for me, the mindmap is a better tool for the development and maintainance of  Project and Someday/Maybe structures than using Tasks in Outlook.”