Node Glue

I’ve been promising for a while to post the glue that ties together Outlook, ActiveWords, GyroActivator, GyroQ, ResultsManager, and MindManager. (Whew! That sounds like a lot of gadgets when they’re all written out in a list like that!) What follows is my attempt to deliver on that promise.

This is just one of the handful of tools/workflows that I use. I call it “tfe”, which stands for “Task From Email”. This was my original Holy Grail usage scenario, meaning, I figured that if I could use these tools to accomplish this, I figured it would dramatically enhance my productivity. Back when I used the Outlook GTD Add-in, I got really attached to working like this. When I’m in the mode of quickly process my inbox, item by item, two minutes or less per item, I want to be able to quickly make an email actionable in as a few steps as possible. The Add-in was very, very good at enabling such a workflow–turning each email into a task very easily.

My “tfe” mashup doesn’t make for quite as smooth an experience as the GTD Add-in in this particular use case, but it’s Good Enough.

Without further ado…

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Gyronix is starting to talk about GyroQ, a handy tool for capturing ideas and actions quickly for later inclusion in MindManager maps. I’ve been testing this in beta for a while and it has become an essential part of my suite of productivity tools.

Backing GyroQ is a nifty scripting-ish layer that allow me to script some things to happen in MindManager, triggered by ActiveWords.

The final component of my inbox-to-map action management system involves the use of some Outlook Macros. I do this because sometimes it’s faster and more precise to run directly against the Outlook object model than to use ActiveWords to script UI interactions.

I’ve been waiting on to get clearance to post some of this stuff since way back when I posted some other ActiveWords scripts for moving stuff from Outlook into MindManager/Results. So this post is a “heads up”, but in the near future, I’ll post the bits and pieces that hold my system together, including how I enqueue attached Outlook email objects as tasks in my ResultsManager InTray using ActiveWords and GyroQ.

A fellow Seattle Mind Camper and good friend, Bryan Zug, suggested that I post the ActiveWords script here that I posted in the Mind Camp file share this weekend.

<only:Outlook><ctrl>f</ctrl>
<pause><tab:5><ctrl>a</ctrl><ctrl>c</ctrl>
<esc><pause>n<ctrl>q</ctrl><alt>e</alt>m
<pause>s<pause>a<pause>v<pause>e<pause>d
<enter><mmbb><pause><ctrl>.</ctrl><pause>
<event><alt></alt>iy</event><tab:10>
<ctrl>v</ctrl><pause><ctrl><home></ctrl>
<pause><shift><tab:5></shift>

This is an ActiveWords script that takes an outlook email and creates a ResultsManager Activity, copying the contents
of the email into the notes field of the activity.
The ResultsManager Activity is created in a static location.
The static location is an “in-tray” on a mind map I call “Bit Bucket.mmap”. I do this because it’s the easiest thing to do,
to always create the Activity in a single location, an in-tray, which reminds me that I need to move it into an appropriate
project list location when I do my weekly review (or whever I process my In-Trays). In the script below, the word <mmbb>
simply opens that Bit Bucket map file.

Because I don’t know a better way to do it, I get the subject
and date header of the email by first pretending to forward the email, which in my setup, copies the body of the original
with the subject, sender, and date.
Also, the script will make sure the email is marked “read” and moved over into my “saved” folder, out of my inbox.

As I mentioned previously, I was at Seattle Mind Camp this past weekend. I do plan to post a summary of highlights soon. But what I managed to get around to writing up first is my wishlist for MindManager. Michael Scherotter of MindJet was present at Mind Camp, and after my session on Getting Things Done, he asked me to send him thoughts/ideas about MindManager. So I sat down to write a short email, and ended up with something rather lengthy, which I’ve decided to post here as well.

So, first in bullet form, here are my thoughts:

• External Map Reference Map Part
• ActiveWords and MindManager
• Better Desktop Search Experience
• Built-in Indexing of Tagged Topics with a Quick Type Ahead Dialog that is Keyboard (and ActiveWords!) invoked
• Externally invocable URI’s

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