Node Glue

Just wanted to quickly post and say that, just now, I hit “zero”.  After a week of being out of the office from having a baby, and returning to office to brand new chaos, I still managed to get to zero.

For the GTD newbies, that means that I’ve processed every item in my various inboxes and made a Do, Delegate, or Defer decision, or filing things for reference.  For me, it also means that for any partially defined tasks that I’ve captured with my PDA, in my moleskine paper notebook, or with GyroQ on my desktop, all of them have been properly defined, assigned owners, some dates, some priorities, and moved out of my ResultsManager In-Tray into real maps where they’re supposed to live.

So…email inbox–zero (including personal inboxes); Outlook task list–zero; ResultsManager In-tray–zero; moleskine task lists–zero.
Next step: it’s time for a deep-cleaning review!

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…

A while back, I was groaning over the turbulence of my mental waters. I just knew that I had a bunch of stuff to do that I wasn’t getting to. Which was true. But then I did my review and learned something.

I arrived at some level of “Mind Like Water” just from doing the review. Actually, I didn’t even do a full review–that usually takes me three or four hours–this was just a mini-review–maybe an hour. And sure, in doing the review, I also did a few things–it feels impossible to keep myself from it. But the big relief seemed to come not from what I completed, but from regaining a sense of control over my stuff instead of feeling controlled by it. It would have taken forever to actually do enough work to regain a sense of control and a steady hand.
I concluded a few things.

1. Sometimes, things are not as out of control as my mind tells me they are. Doing the review cleans up all those frayed ends and fragmented bits of work in my mind, revealing a more accurate–less exaggerated–picture of my actual work load.
2. Sometimes, when I hear myself or others say, “I’m very busy,” it has nothing to do with work. It has to do with being drained of the energy that is required to fret over the gigantic tangled knot of ambiguously defined work that is looming overhead.
3. If I’m not careful, I can be overly soothed by regaining a sense of control in the Review and fail to press forward to actually do the work that I’ve defined.
4. I do better and more creative work when I start with a Mind Like Water

A thought just came to me about the use of “psychic RAM”.

First, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “psychic RAM,” it has nothing to do with paranormal computing!  It’s the term that David Allen uses to represent that short term memory where we store a lot of stuff, TODOs and the like.  The idea is that we need to get that stuff out of our psychic RAM and collected into some sort of trusted system that will prompt us to do something about our stuff at the right time and in the right context.  By getting that stuff off our mind–psychic RAM–we can un-busy our minds and focus on more creative work.

But I think my tendency might be to overkill on the brain dumping process.  My hypothesis now is that we really only need to externalize the trigger, the provocation, the bit of our brains that is the key to reopen the briefcase containing the rest of the mental contents necessary for an action.

If I overdo it, I write down too much stuff, which expends time and energy that may not result in a pay off of completed actions and tangible progress.

If I underdo it, writing down too little, I either lose important bits of information to my memory loss, or else I keep my mind busy with those “open loops” that I’d do better to capture somewhere and get off my mind.

I’m wondering what my life would be like if I adopted a more minimal approach to capturing the stuff in my mind, focusing not on comprehensive dumping, but on capturing those more concise triggers…

Using ResultsManager has become about as automatic to me as waking up and brewing a pot of coffee. It’s just part of life.

A question was asked in a comment to a previous post about how my ResultsManager usage was going. I thought I’d post a response here with a trackback to reply.

I don’t know if you’ll find this comment below an older post, but I’m wondering how things are going with ResultsManager over the last month-and-a-half.

I tried it out last year, and got frustrated at the complexity, but after being off it for a while, I’ve come to miss two things:

1) Seeing the big picture, or larger context of my life
2) Habitually working in MindManager (I tend to open it less–and thus benefit from its creative encouragement–when I’m not using for daily activities)

Please post an update on your progress.

ResultsManager helps me maintain my sanity by giving me decent level of command over of the stuff of my life. So, yes, to your point #1, ResultsManager continues to be a big picture win for me.

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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.

Seattle Mind Camp Organizer, Andru Edwards, posted this article honoring his father.  This tells a beautiful story of a father loving a son unconditionally.

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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