The Productive Organizer

I have blogged about this iPhone Mindmapping software that is really good and how you can use it to incorporate into your GTD system.

Their Version 2.2 is currently in the approval stage and what i like about them is that they don’t rest on their laurels but are coming up with more and more ways to make this mind mapping software as functional as the desktop applications.

Here is a video showing how you can map relationships between related nodes.

What i really hope to is that they can come up with Tagging and Tag filtering of nodes. That will be awesome

Also check out:

GTD Series Part 6:Project Review through iThoughts Mind Mapping Software

Mind Mapping Software for iPhone:iThoughts Review

Introduction

The GTD Series is a series of articles where i share about how i carried out GTD to help me function in daily work.

Part 1 here talks about my plan and overview of my GTD system

Part 2 here talks about why i eventually chose iPod Touch 2G as my main to do list console

Part 3 here talks about why i choose Appigo ToDo for iPhone as my main task manager

Part 4 here talks about how to plan for big projects and smaller projects

Part 5 here talks about how to make use of Contexts, Tags to Execute your tasks

Part 6 here discuss about how you can review projects better using iThoughts mind mapping software

In this article, i will talk more about making use of mind mapping softwares such as iThoughts to plan projects and take notes.

Viewing things from an overall perspective

One of the flaws that i realise for using Appigo ToDo as my main GTD application is that if you want to get a holistic view about things, its difficult.

Why is this so?

In the first part of the series, i highlighted that should you have a new multi step action collected or an action that belongs in an existing project, you should flow back to your Appigo ToDo to perform your project planning assessing what is the actionable task that you should be doing.

Dependencies and Bottlenecks

To me, with my ipod touch on my side all the time, collection is great and dropping it into sub projects. However, certain difficult projects, you would want to see what u have done in chronological order, or an order that shows u dependency. This can’t be done well with most GTD software on the market.

Many folks that use Microsoft project would have realise the importance of dependencies in milestones and tasks and would like to have this flexibility.

For further example we go back to our buying a bicycle example i illustrated in planning for projects and big projects:

1. Ask Son what kind of bicycle he likes
2. Find out how much your family have to pay for the bike (budgeting)
3. Research on where to buy the cheapest bike on the internet
4. Give son a look at the bike see if he likes it
5. Find out what to look out for if it is the first time you are buying a bike
6. Go down and buy the bike
7. Wait for the bike to be delivered to you

In the example here, there are certain things that have no dependency and some that  you have to execute it in a chrono logical order. Example u need to research where to buy the cheapest bike if u are tight on your budget. If you haven’t done that, you can’t carried out the rest of the other actions.

The there are some such as get the son’s approval which, depending on what kind of parent you are you might not care about that and would most likely proceed to action 5 or do it concurrently.

Those actions that do not generate a bottleneck or have dependency are easier to settle. You use your Context management of where you are at such as @Home, @Errands to help u do it fast.

Difficulties in Weekly Review or Daily Review of Project

Those that do, its difficult to use Appigo Todo to view that.

Here we have 3 tasks. If we go by my plan. I would most likely be scheduling my day to solving this client problem. Then i can see what is my next action in office and resolve them. Suppose the bottle neck or the dependency is under @Waiting For or @Contact, then i need to do that first in order to start my actions in @Office.

You can’t see that link in such a GTD application.

If that is the case, what we need to fall back on is to our Weekly Review, Daily Review or Project Review, where we identify what is really the next action.

However, the thing about all these to do list is that, unless you use the desktop ones, you get to see in an order which task you have done and what is left to do.

In Appigo ToDo if you done with the task, it automatically removes it and puts it at the bottom should you chose to show it.

The solution to this is that you should be looking for a mobile task management software that is THAT flexible. But if that is the case, you are looking at something ah la Microsoft Project + Context filtering on iPhone. Do we have that? The answer is i have failed to locate such an application.

iThoughts as a solution

The discovery of mind mapping software such as MindJet and iThoughts have brought about a possible solution to this.

I am still experimenting with it but so far its been a complicated planning process. I don’t want to make it overly complicated so its purely to test out how good iThoughts is as a GTD planning tool.

As a primer to what iThoughts can do, please review this article that shows how powerful this would make your iphone and ipod touch.

Viewing the Vision,Goals and Areas of Responsibility

The thing about iThoughts is that you can bring your map from your favorite desktop mind mapping software Freemind or Mind Manager to this app and vice versa.

So it means that if iThoughts close shop on you, you are not screwed.

So back to topic. You can actually create a vision map to enable u to plan and review your goals and what you hope to achieve.

There are numerous templates out there on the web, and the good thing about iThoughts is that you can always have a template map and duplicate that map so that you can reuse and reuse a map template again.

Here is an example of a map illustrating your goals for the year or 3 years and what are the area’s of responsibility to bring you to that. The great thing about this mind mapping tool is that it can take a large area so u can literally go on to plan your projects here as well. But for me i just find it very clustered if i go on further. I would rather plan sub projects in a seperate map.

iThoughts enable you to show progress as well.so that means you can do quarterly review of these maps to see how far you are from achieve these goals and whether for example you need to redefine your big projects( your big projects will be those Area of Responsibilities, which are equivalent to large lists in Appigo ToDo)

Planning projects in detail

By setting a Project Planning Mind Map Template, you can easily duplicate this template and start planning your projects.

A note is that, it would be best to plan really extensive projects that are more complex here in iThoughts. For simple stuff like buying a bicycle, i would recommend software like Things or Appigo ToDo. It makes life easier. Different software have their strengths and weakness and GTD to-do list excel in quick collection and filtering based on contexts.

Mind Mapping software like iThoughts do not do filtering that well.

The goal of project planning is that you have an idea about

1. Why you are doing this (Purpose)
2. Where you are at
3. Where do you want to be (Outcome)
4. What are my constraints? (time? resources? other complexity?)
5. What do i have to do (Milestones)

And in a template such as this, things become very clear at one glance. This is an example about buying an insurance policy. So the purpose and  outcome and constraints are spelt out clearly whenever you review and plan.

You will also be able to see your progress of each milestones clearly plus how much time you have left or whether a milestone is overdue (denoted by the red clock in “REquest advice from advisor”)

Here we drill down from the milestones to tasks. The conflict that i have is that you can’t really filter your tasks by context. But really if you are someone who wants a once glance review and plan ahead, such a task management mind map will be great.

Here you see that a target icon marks my next action and what i should be focusing on. This would work, if you schedule a time to carry out such a sub project. If you don’t schedule it on your calendar then if you keep so many sub projects map you end up checking here check there to see what you should be doing.

This is where you really give and take and really appreciate Appigo ToDo. You can view all your sub projects and which is your next actions easily but not iThoughts.

I would suggest that for someone who is using a task management application like Things or Appigo ToDo, put your tasks necessary in your Appigo Todo, don’t double entry. it wastes time.

Use iThoughts purely as a review and planning from a higher perspective.

1. Review your iThoughts Milestones
2. Move to your Appigo ToDo check if its completed
3. If it is and all the tasks in the milestones are completed move the progress to the appropriate level.
4. Re-evaluate milestones and brainstorm if there are tasks that needs to be added into any of the milestones.
5. Review if you can still meet your deadline.

Conclusion

This is by no means a good solution. But iThoughts is such a flexible software that it can weave into this purpose of reviewing and keeping track of your 50000 – 20000 feet stuff.

That way you don’t lose track of what is the overall objective.

Introduction

In one of my previous post, i did a brief overview on Mindjet, a mind mapping software that is available for your ipod touch or iphone. Mindjet is also the company that brought you mind manager, a state of the art mind mapping software that is pretty expensive for most of us.

Digital vs Analog Mind Mapping

I used Mind Manager before and really its a great software to mind map on your laptop or desktop. But my good friend Melvin made a comment, that if he were to mind map, he would rather use a piece of paper.

I find that digital mind mapping have advantages, particularly, you can:

• re-arrange the nodes so that you can structure your thoughts
• you can easily archive and reference them next time for notes
• you can translate them into project plans or tasks list
• you can link them to your word,excel and web documents

Perhaps the problem with a desktop or laptop is that for Kinetic people they need to scribble down things instead of clicking and typing and looking at a screen.

For me though, I find it difficult to collect my thoughts or do planning facing a digital mind map. I am a kinetic person, which means i remember things better if i scribble it down. But really, the problem for me is that i tend to misplaced by maps all over the place. So i like something digital, but also enables me to mind map wherever i can, not bounded to any desktop or laptop. The best option is that if i were to be able to find something good on the Apple iPhone app store it will be good!

Requirements of my mind mapping software

In my exploration of apps on the Apple iPhone App Store, i found a few softwares that does mind mapping. Some of them are great like Mind Meister, which touts that their app for the iphone can sync real time with their online maps.However, as part of my needs to keep notes offline and away from the web, i need better solution. Specifically:

• Maps must be sophisticated compare to desktop mind mapping tool
• Maps must be able to view both on iPhone and desktop
• Maps must be portable
• Pricing must be affordable

So i stumble upon Mindjet and iThoughts.

iThoughts Overview

iThoughts was released first before Mindjet. And the similarities between the 2 applications are very very similar. I got a feeling the folks at Mindjet copied what the folks at iThoughts did to come up with theirs (don’t sue me! everyone will think the same way after looking at the comparison here!)

The problem of them being so similar is that for the same price which one should i go for?In the end i took my plunge with iThoughts instead of MindJet and i have not regretted since.

Pricing

Both iThoughts and Mindjet cost USD6.99. Its not cheap, but its not that expensive compare to GTD apps that i bought such as Appigo ToDo. The cost is nothing if it brings improve productivity to my life. Hey, some of my dinner cost like USD15, so i believe i am not paying an expensive price for an independent application.

Version

Version reviewing is version 2.1.

Why is it good?

Basically, most of the basic things you are able to do on your desktop mind map software such as Nova Mind and Mind Manager you can do it here

Able to handle large maps

iThoughts uses a canvas to paint the topics and they tout that you can go greater than 1000x the screen area which is more than enough for me.

You can zoom in zoom out of maps to get a better vantage view after you have rearrange or finish composing

Very good performance

What i really like about this application is that not only does it have a lot of good functionality, those that i expect to be in it, but on the iPod Touch 2G it does it with a very good performance.

• Double tapping immediately brings out the Topic input screen
• Not much lag on scrolling around canvas to review Map
• Organization of the above map neatly is fast

Very friendly Topic input mechanism

Entering a new topic or nodes is a breeze! All you need to do is touch on a parent topic once to select that topic. You can enter a new topic by touching the top buttons to either enter a child or sibling topic.

Additionally, the fast way is to double tap an area to insert a child topic.

(More screenshots and functionality explanation after the break)

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Mind Mapping Zealots on Windows platform have been using the freeware java program FreeMind for  some time. This is probably a good note taking alternative for that. But i think the value is in the Pro Version which offers advance features like To Do lists.

Do give it a try and tell me what you think of it.

One of XMind’s biggest assets is its ease of use. When you first open the program, you’re greeted by a clean interface that conforms to most of the popular norms of mind mapping software today: a horizontal toolbar above the workspace and tabbed dialog boxes to the right of it where you can handle many common tasks, such as changing topic shapes and colors, adjusting topic text font, style and color, changing the map’s structure. The program is designed with extensive support for right-click commands, which I really like, because you can accomplish common tasks within the map workspace, eliminating the need to make trips to the program’s main toolbar and the tabbed sidebar (please click on the image above to view a larger version of a typical map produced using XMind 2008).

XMind supports a variety of fishbone, radial mind map, organizational chart, tree and logic chart formats. The fishbone diagram format makes XMind especially unique; to be best of my knowledge, it’s the only mind mapping program that’s capable of producing this type of diagram, which is used for cause and effect analysis. It can be used to depict a series of activities in a time sequence, and how the whole project is impacted by different milestones on the schedule.

XMind’s dialog boxes are context sensitive; if you select a topic, tabs that are appropriate to tweaking the appearance of topics are displayed. If you click on a blank area of the workspace, then XMind displays commands for changing the map’s background, map legend and other making other map-level adjustments.

Creating a map in XMind

Creating and manipulating map topics in XMind is very straightforward: You can add topics using a toolbar command, the program’s drop-down “insert” menu or using the insert key – the de facto standard for many mind mapping programs.  The program supports other keyboard shortcuts for quickly adding topics to your maps. If you press the Enter key twice after typing in topic text, the program will save your topic and open another one at the same level of your mind map. This makes it easy and convenient to add a large number of topics to your map very quickly. Clicking the Tab plus the Insert key creates a subtopic of the current topic. Shift + Enter creates a topic on the same level, but before current topic. And Ctrl + Enter creates a parent topic of the current topic. These commands make XMind ideal for recording ideas in a group brainstorming session.

XMind automatically positions topics. If you want to override that, the program gives you several options. If you hold down the ALT key while dragging a topic (in Windows), that topic will remain where you drop it. If you hold down the CTRL key while dragging a topic, XMind will create a duplicate topic at the same level of your map as the source topic. Finally, if you hold down the Shift key while dragging a topic, it will be moved to its new position as a floating topic. I really like this simple and flexible approach; I found it to be very intuitive.

When you add a note to a topic in XMind, the notes window appears as a pop-up – a much more efficient use of screen real estate than most programs, which open a window pane that extends along the entire bottom of the workspace or to the right of it. When you’re done typing your note, simply click in another area of the workspace, and the note closes automatically. Easy and simple! If you’re working with longer blocks of text, you can click an “edit in notes view” command that closes the pop-up and re-opens the notes in a pane below the workspace. XMind’s note functionality includes text formatting, text alignment, indenting, color and note background color – just the essentials.

You can also add relationship lines and boundaries to topics in XMind 2008. I had a little bit of a problem getting a relationship line to not overlap another map topic; the program allows you to drag a handle to adjust its shape, but only up to a point. Also, when I tried to surround two contiguous topics with a boundary, it overlapped the map’s central topic. I couldn’t figure out any way to prevent that from happening, until I added more first level topics to the map, and the overlap resolved itself.

“Spreadsheet topics” open up new possibilities

One capability that makes XMind somewhat unique – especially at its “free” price point – is the ability to create map topics that are spreadsheets. This dramatically expands the type of information that an XMind map can contain. To create one, you simply right click on the topic and select the structure/spreadsheet option. A small colored bar chart appears next to the topic name, with a plus sign that indicates you can click on it to expand the spreadsheet view.  The program initially creates a 2 column by 2 row spreadsheet, but you can add columns and rows as needed. The procedure to do this was a little hard to understand at first, but once I got the hang of it, I was fine. I was able to rearrange columns by dragging and dropping them – nice!

What’s really remarkable about spreadsheet cells is that they can contain complex structures – such as a topic plus several connected sub-topics (see the map image above for an example of this). When I was playing around with XMind 2008, I was able to create a spreadsheet that analyzed the performance of 3 imaginary salespeople. I created columns for sales and margin, plus a third column that contained mini-maps with my conclusions about each person. This ought to open up a whole range of new possibilities for business mapping.

I’d recommend several improvements, however: first, the process of adding new rows and columns needs to be made easier; a right click command, perhaps? Also, it would be nice if you could perform simple math functions on cells – creating a total of the values contained within a column, for example. Otherwise, this part of XMind 2008’s functionality was quite impressive.

Flexible handing of attachments

You can attach a file to an XMind topic in two ways: The first, the more conventional approach, is to right click on the topic and select the “insert attachment” command. An icon appears next to the topic to show that it contains an attachment – much the same way as almost every mind mapping program handles this functionality. Here’s where it gets good: Attachments can also be dragged and dropped onto an XMind map. If you drag them to a topic, they become a subtopic of the topic you selected. They, in turn, can also have subtopics, which enables you to create some surprisingly complex map structures.

Files that are dragged and dropped into an empty part of the map workspace become floating topics. In both cases, they behave just like ordinary topics: you can edit the document name displayed in the map, change its color and style, and so on. Very cool! All attachments travel with XMind files during distribution and sharing, so that anyone you share your maps with will be able to view their attached file assets.

When you are sharing your maps with others, they can select the attachment topic, right click to open the context menu, and then select “open attachment” or “save attachment as” commands, depending upon what they want to do with it.

Drill down

Some mind mapping programs enable you to “focus in” on a topic – so that only it and its sub-topics are displayed. This can be especially useful if you have ADD tendencies (which I do), which can cause you to be easily distracted. This functionality enables you to temporarily eliminate the rest of your map from view, so you can focus upon fully developing that part of your map. When you’re done, you can return to the full map view. I was pleased to learn that XMind supports this functionality, which it calls “drill down” and “drill up.”

One thing that makes XMind’s implementation unique is that when you are drill down into one section of your map, you can create floating topics that are only visible in that view. In other words, when you return to the full map view, those floating topics no longer appear. The developers of XMind say this technique can help you to reduce the overall complexity of your overall mind map, while displaying a lot more detail at its lower levels.

I tried this, and it worked really well. I drilled down to a first level topic, created two floating topics and then drilled back up to the full map view. When you’re in drill down mode, your central topic displays an upward pointing arrow next to the topic text, which you can click upon to take you back to the full map view – very convenient. After I returned to the full map view, the topic I had been working with displayed a green downward pointing arrow, which indicates that more content is nested within it. Once again, you can click on the arrow to access the drill down view of that topic.

[Read the full article @ Mind Mapping Software Blog >>]