Node Glue

Recently, I’ve been reminded of something David Allen says in Getting Things Done. He is addressing the following question: “so now that I’ve got all my stuff in a trusted system, how do I decide what to do at any given moment?” Allen’s answer: “trust your intuition.”

Sounds so simple, right? But I think I spend too much of my time not trusting my intuition. As a result, I sometimes find myself trying to compensate for that lack of trust by refining the system to make it more trustworthy. The system sets up some rules for me, which helps. These guardrails often keep me out of the ditches. But the rules can also bind me and leave me feeling guilty if I don’t follow them. That guilt itself hinders productivity.

I’ve marveled before at those non-GTD people who just do what seems best at any given moment. Frankly, I’m suspicious that such a method is too susceptible to the tyranny of the urgent, and I think it truly is. But on the other hand, they enjoy a certain kind of freedom in “going with the gut.” So, again, there is the possibility of freedom (going with the gut), and the possibility of bondage (enslaved to the tyranny of the urgent).

So here’s my musing for the day. Perhaps an appropriate tension between these two is: use the trusted system to educate the intuition, making the intuition more trustworthy. Then work from intuition.

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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.

It’s July 3rd, and I just opened my most recently generated review dashboard in ResultsManager to freshen it.  Guess what date I last generated a review dashboard.

April 19 (yes, 2007)  Not long before my last blog post!  So, about 2.5 months.  And I’m shooting for weekly reviews!
So I guess you could say I’ve been in “guerilla review” mode for a while now.  Which means I’ve been getting by reviewing one map at a time, processing in-trays, and mini-reviews from my daily actions dashboard, just trying to tread water.
Just wanted to put that confession out there to the world…

I’ve recategorized some of my previous posts, opening a new category for posts that touch more on the “messy human elements” of productivity and systems.

A listing of those posts are here: Heart of Productivity.

I have a feeling that I’ll be blogging more in this direction in the future, along with continued scripts and tips using my favorite tools for productivity–ResultsManager, MindManager, GyroQ, ActiveWords, GyroActivator.

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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Kyle McFarlin, a Gyronix trainer, posted yesterday about how technology attempts to define us, and urges us to think about what we would do with our time if it all disappeared.

Ironically, I think I’m constantly trying to get the technology to help me do the very things that I would do if there was no technology, only more of it. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t.

But Kyle’s thought certainly resonates with me. There are days when it feels like the technology is taking over and I’m being assimilated into the Borg.

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.