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.

Recently, I took the plunge and invested the big $ for MindJet MindManager Pro 6! I got it yesterday and installed it on my machine and I am in the process of learning my way around this powerful tool. What I immediately enjoy is the integration with Microsoft Outlook for task management. If you have read through my GTD journey from last year, you might remember that I was looking for a way to synchronize my Projects and Someday/Maybes from my Mindmap to Outlook. Well I have found a solution that works for me.

Santa was good to me and I have received many goodies from Levenger. Mmmmm! Thanks Santa!

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.

I’m an avid MindMapper, but in this case I did not think that a tool such as FreeMind or MindManager might suffice owing to the inherent tree-like structure of a mind map. While it is possible to create linkages between nodes, there is no capability to capture semantic information on the arcs. I also looked at Concept Maps (a really great package can be found here),
but the visuals got fairly crowded quickly. So I kept on searching and came across a package called PersonalBrain. This package seems to have merit for this kind of task as one can make multiple associations to build a network-like structure. PersonalBrain comes with a 30 day trial so I downloaded and installed the package. They have a really good online tutorial that gives you a good picture on how to use the tool, and so half an hour later I started to
build my network.

I wanted to capture not only the people in my network and their relationships to other people, schools, groups, clubs, activities, companies and locations. Fortunately PersonalBrain allows the user to represent any kind of abstraction as a node. A node in PersonalBrain is called a “thought”. Thoughts can have multiple parents, multiple children as well as special connections called jump points. You can even create new thought types and link types to capture semantic information. I created a new thought
type called “Person” and some link types: “knows” and “should be introduced” for example.

I started to map out locations by country, then region (states in the US), and then by city. Then I created a list of all the schools, groups, clubs, activities and so on and identified their location. Finally, for each person I linked them to their pertinent nodes and then created links between the people so that I could document who knows whom etc. As each individual was added to the map, I fleshed out the semantic details of the association and annotated the links.

As an example, I can pull up a geographic location, see all the clubs, schools, organizations, corporations etc. associated with people I know. Conversely, I can select a person and see their hobbies, schools attended, places worked. I can have fairly detailed notes associated with any one of these “thoughts”. PersonalBrain has search features, I have not had the time to explore the capabilities. One thing you can do is to find all thoughts by type, so I can get a list of all the people I know.

When you step back and look at your immediate network, and the second level network (people that your immediate network know) the richness and diversity is staggering. In the spirit of building Social Capital, you can examine your relationships and ask how you add value to each of the relationships that already exist, as well as how you could add value to a relationship you would like to create. Once you have a network documented, you can make all sorts of powerful connections: I found three people
who do not know each other right now, and they share the same set of hobbies including a passion for golf. I’m thinking of setting up a foursome soon. Fore!

Technorati Tags: PersonalBrain