Node Glue

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.

The cool thing about this is that I can link to the Maybe Never sections of many maps and scan all of my Maybe Nevers in one place. And the Map Linker even lets me automatically retrieve updates from the other maps. So once I’ve linked to a given map’s Maybe Never section, I don’t have to do any further manual updated to see the changes in this master Maybe Never map. Pretty cool, I think. [We’ll see how useful this actually turns out to be in time, though ]

Wrapping Up

Well, that’s all for this round of system tweaking. I hope some of these ideas might be helpful to someone else. But I enjoyed writing them down anyway. I like to show off ResultsManager, because I think it’s a wonderful tool for organizing my life. If you’d like to check out a trial version, you can do that here.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 11:17 pm and is filed under GTD, productivity, MindManager, ResultsManager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.