A pivotal aspect to my professional and personal life at the moment is Mindjet® MindManager®.
I think of MindManager as my control tower. I use it to plan, track and act. I use the brainstorming capabilities, the topic task capabilities, the topic styles, the map styles, the multi-map capability and I couldn't operate without the TabletPC integration.
I use MindManager to see what needs to be done and in what order. I also use MindManager at the end of the day, week and month to review my achievements and then plan where I am going next.
I start my work day by opening my high-level mind map. This map has five topics, each representing a key part of my role (i.e. People, Process, Service Delivery, Sales and Company activities). Each of these five topics is hyper-linked to another map. Each of these sub maps has a further five or so main topics, with each topic representing a key facet of that aspect to my role. From there I branch out into projects and major activities. I also typically split major project off into separate maps and link these to the appropriate main topic. In this way I have a hierarchy of maps for managing my activities, tasks, project and goals.
The project related maps are the central source for the projects I manage. Not all those that I work with use MindManager, so I often export maps to Excel and Microsoft Project in order to disseminate information to my team and my customers.
In addition to managing my own activities, I use map topics to record activities I have assigned to team members, I also at times track interdependent activities whereby my ability to perform is in some way linked to a colleague or customer.
In terms of non task activities, I use MindManager for preparing meeting agenda, capturing meeting minutes, structuring proposals, writing papers and of course brainstorming. The results of my work is typically exported to Microsoft Word in order to share it with others.
I have a very mobile work day, often out of the office in meetings and workshops and in that context I couldn't operate without the TabletPC capabilities and the built-in hand-recognition.
At the heart of my MindManager experience is The TPAssist Method and a Mindmanager addin that makes it all possible, TPAssist 2007.
