Using ResultsManager to Reorganize My Work (Again): Part 1 of 9
If you been reading this blog over the past couple of months, you know that I’ve been groaning under the weight of too many activities. Not that I’m doing too many activities, of course, just that the proliferation of undone work is getting to me. This is the first in a series of articles about some changes that I’m making to help me cope.
A lot of this is relevant to anyone paying attention to how his/her work is defined and organized. So even if you aren’t familiar with GTD or ResultsManager, you might find some good in reading it.
Some of it is based GTD concepts and terminology. If you aren’t already familiar with GTD, I would invite you to check it out, starting with David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done,” or looking up GTD in wikipedia (or click here).
And since I use ResultsManager as my preferred tool for organizing my work, all of what I’m talking about is ultimately implemented in ResultsManager. But there are many ways to implement a GTD system, including using simple paper index cards.
My Problem
I’ve recently realized that my ResultsManager dashboard is too hot, meaning, there are just too many things on there. So many that it becomes overwhelming to look at. Whereas the dashboard should only carry as many items as would be reasonably doable over the course of two or three days, mine tends to carry enough for a few months! (more on what a dashboard is below)
The good part of that is that I have the contents of my brain captured, all the “open loops,” so I can make conscious decisions about them instead of just having them bouncing around my mind creating headaches. But when there are so many activities on the Daily Actions Dashboard, the trimmed down view of just those activities that are doable now, I get bogged down just scanning the list looking for something to do. And that defeats the purpose of showing me a focused list of doable actions in the first place! So I’ve been on a quest lately to trim things down.
In this series of articles, I’ll describe a couple of fundamental changes I’m making about how I define and organize my work in an attempt to regain my sanity one step at a time. Then I’ll show how I’m implementing those changes in ResultsManager.
But First, a Primer on Key ResultsManager Terminology
ResultsManager is an add-in for a mind mapping tool called MindManager. It allows one to structure a GTD project with it’s Next Actions, called Activites by ResultsManager. Furthermore, these activities may be given contexts, owners, categories, areas, start and due dates, and priorities. This all amounts to giving me any number of ways to summarize, sort, review my work, and help me make decisions about what to do when.
Normally, someone will have several maps, each of which may include one or more projects or actions. A project map might look like this.
A dashboard is a special map generated by ResultsManager that aggregates all of those separate maps and creates one cohesive, organized, simplified view.
A Daily Actions Dashboard, for example, shows me only those actions from among my maps that are actually doable now. It won’t show me those activities that depend on other activities to be completed first, or activities whose start dates are still in the future. It also highlights activites for which I’ve set deadlines. So I can use this dashboard to drive my daily activities.
The following is an excerpt of a very simple Daily Actions Dashboard. It shows only activities from the above pictured project map for simplicity of illustration. Normally, a Daily Actions Dashboard would contain activities from many project maps.
So to come back to my problem, for a moment, now that you can see the picture. My version of the Daily Actions Dashboard above is so large that I can’t realistically deal with it. It’s a “hot” dashboard, having way too many activities on it.
A Review Dashboard, on the other hand, scans the same set of maps, but shows me a different view of their contents. It will show me all the overdue activities, the projects I’ve marked with Priority 1, my entire list of Active Projects, as well as the entire list of my Someday/Maybe projects. These are the sorts of things that I need to be looking at when I do my Weekly Review.
Here’s a picture of the Review Dashboard for our sample map. Again, because this is a stipped down example, not all of the normal sections of the Review Dashboard are shown here. And mine actually contains some custom sections that don’t appear in the default Dashboard template–which is what I’ll be talking about later. But hopefully, you get the idea.
So you can see that different dashboards support different workflows. I’ve only given two examples, but these two represent more than 90% of the time I spend using dashboards.
Again, the basic idea is that a dashboard is one map, generated by ResultsManager from my entire set of project maps, that shows me a simplified view of my work, customized for a particular workflow.
Wrapping Up For Now
OK, there’s the ground work, enough for now.
Next time, I’ll begin with the first concept that I’ve recently applied to helping me cope: separating Committed activities from merely Active ones.