Node Glue

This is an update to a series of posts from almost a year ago, back in November 2006. The series was entitled Using ResultsManager to Reorganize My Work (Again). In the final article in the series, I suggested the idea of adding a bucket called “Maybe Never”. This was the bucket of tasks that wouldn’t even show up on my dashboards, I was so uncommitted to them. And yet, I couldn’t just let myself delete them either. It was my ResultsManager equivalent of the Windows XP Recycle Bin. I can delete…and then if I change my mind…undelete.

Well, it’s nearly a full year later, and I’m here to report the total number of times that I’ve opened my Maybe Never map and reviewed it.

Never.

Nick Duffill of Gyronix (the maker of ResultsManager) commented insightfully in that series that:

You’re absolutely right about resistance to deleting things, but it is a cathartic habit to take positive decisions, even wrong decisions. History and commerce have always favoured the decision-takers higher than the opportunity-creators, even if they turned out to be wrong later. Another way to deal with things in this category if the review process might not catch them is to defer them for a few months, then they will come back again. When you have deferred them several times in a row, you might feel more comfortable with deleting them.

So, lately, I’ve been much more free with the delete key–and I rarely look over my shoulder. This is yet another example to show that my biggest productivity bottlenecks are not in my software, but in my mind. The corollary would seem to be that my biggest productivity gains will be achieved by tweaking my mind. So I do that. And then I tweak the software some more

Here’s something else I’ve been trying to figure out lately…

I can’t believe that I’ve only recently discovered the project management technique of the Role Assignment Matrix using RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed).  It seems that I should have stumbled onto that much sooner.  I think it’s going to change my life and the lives of those around me–time will tell

Anyway.

As I begin to use RACI for more and more role clarification on projects and activities, I’m interested to see how I can incorporate it into ResultsManager.  It would be nice, for example, to see on a relationship dashboard with one of my direct reports, which things he is an “A” for (accountable–buck stops here), and what things he is strictly an “R” for (responsible–the ‘doer’).  Because I rely on ResultsManager so much to give me views into my world and and the worlds of those I manage, it would be nice to add these new bits of information from RACI onto my dashboards, instead of managing that information outside of ResultsManager (likely a spreadsheet) where it will likely fall out of sync.
I could that easily if there were simply some extra fields on a ResultsManager activity that had corresponding dashboard filters that could be used to group/sort/filter activities by RACI role.

In the meantime, I’m going lo-tech and simply including role information as a text comment at the top of the comments field in each activity.  So it’s there when it comes time to review activities.  But it doesn’t give me any flexibility for automation of group/sort/filter.  I’m trying to learn to live with “good enough”.

I’m honestly surprised to get a couple of comments on my last post, when I haven’t even posted since July! But if I count the two other comments that have come to me “off line” lately, it suggests that some people out there have actually noticed that I haven’t been posting

So, I’ll post again.

Here’s a new thing I’m trying. Very new, but it is in motion–we’ll see where it goes.

Problem

I live my life out of ResultsManager. The team I lead doesn’t. And I don’t want to require them to learn RM or MindManager. I don’t think they are the best tools for them to help them be productive in their work. With the exception of my assistant. He’s a technical guy and uses RM himself. So we sync our maps with FolderShare and it works great between the two of us.

So how do I show the rest of my team members what our agreements are with one another and ask them to report on status in a structured way?

Resources and Contraints

I meet with them each week for 30 minutes as a minimum. In that time, I want to give first priority to their agenda–anything they are blocking on or need to talk about with me. It’s a good time to touch on any more personal concerns they may have as well. So I often don’t have time in that 1:1 to do an exhaustive rundown of the various activities that are on the dashboard with their names on them. And I don’t want to turn that meeting into a purely robotic tactical checklist processing thing; the human touch is more important to me in that context.

I already have a customized ResultsManager dashboard for each direct report that gives me a snapshot of the agreements between me and each person. That dashboard is based on this template provided by Activity Owner.

Solution

Exporting a Word document from a Mind Manager map is a standard feature of Mind Manager.I’ve asked my assistant to weekly generate the relationship dashboard for each direct report, and then export it to a Word doc. He then sends the Word doc, marked “for review”, to each direct report. Marking it for review automatically delivers the doc with change tracking turned on. So the direct report can simply start typing updates into the doc and return it to
my assistant, who can update the maps. They should get this each week a couple of days before our weekly 1:1 meeting.
Evaluation

I talked through this with each of my team members as I designed it. I gave them my rationale (above), and they appreciated it. Most of them were delighted to see all their stuff structured in one tracking document, and may even be interested in adding more stuff to it, just as a convenient way to track more stuff. Nobody has yet balked at the size, appearance, or format of the resulting Word doc.

At this point, we’ve only it made it about half way around the cycle. Meaning, I’ve scrubbed down the dashboards with them to make them current and relevant, and given my assistant the go-ahead to start generating, exporting and emailing weekly. We have yet to close the loop on getting feedback from each of them bubbled back up to me. So it’s too soon to report on how effective this is or isn’t.

My next step, now that they’ve all received real versions of this thing, is to ask them how it’s working and figure out if we need to adjust it or simply beat the drum for a while to get used to a new rhythm.

The Maybe Never Map
The other approach I’ve taken is to create a Maybe Never map, link to Map Central, and of course, mark the linked topic with the Exclude from Dashboard icon. Like this.

For those of you who are new to ResultsManager, Map Central is the usual starting point for generating a dashboard. This map has links to the other maps and directories of maps that I want to be scanned when a dashboard is generated. It really doesn’t make sense for the Maybe Never map to be here–I’ll never want to include it in a scan of the rest of my maps. But it serves as a visual reminder that this map is still part of my universe of maps. Hopefully that will remind me at least a few times a year to open it up and give it a quick review.

One other trick is within the Maybe Never map itself. Here’s a screenshot of a sample Maybe Never map.

On the left, under Projects, there are a couple of random projects that I’ve just thrown into this map for safe keeping. I might have cut them from another map and pasted them here.

On the right, though, I have imported some of the contents of the My Work map. All I have to do to import a branch from another map is to create a hyperlink in this map to that topic in the other map. Then, with the linked topic selected in this map, I select an option on MindManager’s Tools menu called “Convert hyperlink to External Reference.” And presto, MindManger imports the contents of that other map here. This functionality is provided by a freely downloadable add-in from MindJet called the Map Linker.

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Using ResultsManager and MindManager to Separate Someday/Maybe from “Maybe Never”

One of the most useful tricks I’ve learned over the past few months is to use the “Exclude from Dashboard” icon on some map topics to stop the Dashboard Generator from walking through them looking for activities. For example, in some of my project maps, I have rather large sets of notes mapped under a Main Topic called Resources. Under normal circumstances, the Dashboard Generator would walk through all of those subtopics. But I can put the “Exclude from Dashboard” icon on the Resources topic, and when the Dashboard Generator sees that icon, it just skips the whole branch. One of the best side effects of this is improved performance. So I use this icon all over the place now, anywhere I know that no activities that belong on a dashboard reside. This turns out to be a perfect mechanism for a Maybe Never list!

In the following project map, you can see that I’ve relegated a couple of activites to Maybe Never, simply by dragging and dropping them under the Maybe Never topic that is marked with the red “Exclude from Dashboard” icon. (Looks like a No Entry symbol).

When this map is scanned by the Dashboard Generator, it will ignore everything under Maybe Never. At some point in the future, when I’m cleaning up this map, I can glance at those Maybe Nevers. Maybe someday, I’ll be convinced that they really are garbage and I’ll delete them!

Wrapping Up

Now you can see a basic way to punt stuff to Maybe Never within each project map. Next, I’ll describe the other mechanism I use: The Maybe Never Map.

Modifying the Daily Actions Dashboard to add the Explicitly Committed Branch

Modifying ResultsManager Dashboards is kinda fun, I think. ResultsManager uses Dashboard Templates to generate Dashboards. The templates outline the contents of dashboards without defining that content. They describe the content using Dashboard Filters. You can read all about that in ResultsManager’s online help module.

One easy way to modify the appropriate dashboard template, is to find it in your My Dashboards directory under My Maps, which lives under My Documents. (These are default locations. Yours may be different.)

I opened the file called “ResultsManager Daily Actions Dashboard (Power User).mmap” and made some changes like this.

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Using ResultsManager to Separate Committed from Active
The Daily Actions Dashboard is ultimately where I want to see the effects of my work to separate committed activities from merely active ones.I’ll do that by creating a separate branch within the dashboard that shows only explicitly committed activities.

First, here’s a screenshot of an the sample project map that I’ll be using.

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My New Review Process

With these two concepts creating clear divisions between Committed and Active, and between Someday/Maybe and Maybe Never, I can now reassign my work to each of those different buckets using the following guidelines.

1. Identify the activities that are truly committed to other people and explicitly mark them committed. This is done in ResultsManager simply by checking the committed box on the Edit Activity dialog as shown above.
2. Identify the activities that are truly Someday/Maybe and explicitly mark them as such. This is also done in the Edit Activity dialog.
3. Identify the activities that should be punted to Maybe Never and exclude them from the dashboard or move them to a separate “Maybe Never” map.

The remaining parts of this series will cover the How To of using ResultsManager to support these modifications to my process. Next, I’ll discuss: Using ResultsManager to Separate Committed from Active.

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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Concept #2: Separating the Someday/Maybe activities from “Maybe Never” ones

In the recent past, the Someday/Maybe designation for activities had begun to lose all meaning to me. Part of my journey back to sanity is to reclaim it!

I had been using Someday/Maybe like a black hole, relegating anything marked Someday/Maybe to oblivion. And since so many things lived there, I became rather unmotivated to review it often enough to pull things back onto my dashboard when they should.

Now you might be asking, “Well what difference does that make? Why bother to bring it back once you’ve pushed it out to Someday/Maybe? It must not be that important.”

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