… 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.

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.