For the presentation click here: year-6-day-4-october-08 

Although I am comfortable with maintaining my creativity while working on a computer, for many people, the very use of a keyboard, screen and mouse, switches the left brain into dominant mode - thus suppressing the creative right hemisphere.

For this reason, on my workshops and in the Home Study online course, I recommend that, at least, the early maps are done with paper and pen.

Imagine my surprise when I came across the latest version of iMindMap from Tony Buzan. At last, mind mapping software which doesn't constrain the user to a rigid framework. It uses a clever vector graphics engine so that the map is not limited by the technology or the screen in a rectilinear fashion. As such, it can be introduced much earlier in the creative writing process.

For authors who have taken the Home Study course, if you purchase iMindMap, I will send you a free set of mind map templates to help you plan, execute and manage your book project.

You can get a free trial and purchase iMindMap here

For more about how this all works, have a watch of this short video ....

Then some more guys in the audience almost simultaneously said "Your First Picture is a Mind Map". "It must definitely be a nick name that I have missed. And a quite good one", I thought. Suddenly I realized that what these guys were really saying was that my first picture in my Pomodoro Technique slides was a real Mind Map. Yes, I know that of course. It's a radiant description of me - see picture below.

The whole scenario took only a few seconds, but it gave me a tidy insight: A Mind Map, at least as I use them, is the first picture that pops out of my head. It's the plain sailing from the associations in my brain to a multi dimensional picture on the paper in front of me.

This will be a part of my repertoire:
-What is a Mind Map?
-It's The First Picture!

Additional facts:

• Reversed maps show Australia and New Zealand at the top of the map instead of the bottom.
• The hippocampus is a part of the brain and is important for short term memory and spatial navigation.
• Philosopher Ramon Llull used something similar to Mind Maps already in the 13th century.
• A volatile picture is one that exists only for a short period of time, e.g. an object in a mirror. That is opposed to a hard copy which is a fixed picture.

O sistema é espetacular, e já o estou usando, embora não com cores (de repente, num futuro próximo eu utilize) nem com imagens, apenas ícones que facilitam discernir o que é documento, o que é uma informação, etc. No escritório, meu primeiro projeto com esse sistema é a organização das pastas suspensas que temos. Uma vez que o mapeamento esteja completo, será possível organizar melhor o atendimento ao cliente.

Quem mais utiliza esse sistema? IBM, Microsoft, Boeing, BBC e outras empresas (e indivíduos, como Bill Gates e Al Gore). Note que isto vai de encontro ao meu post anterior com o vídeo do Sir Ken Robinson: a criatividade auxilia o mal aluno (como o próprio autor deste livro disse que era). Criando uma experiência cognitiva rica, o autor disponibiliza uma maneira fácil de memorizar conteúdos por meio da associação (seja de cores, imagens, etc.).

A discussão, eu acho, deve ser como introduzir os mapas mentais no currículo escolar, ao invés de se perguntar "devemos?" Será que na 1ª série do Ensino Fundamental já é a hora certa? Afinal de contas, é muito bom que a criança tenha condições de compreender o conteúdo, mas é importante também que ela aprenda a escrever corretamente. Pela minha compreensão, olhando para trás eu lembro de todo tempo que nós passávamos nas aulas de matemática praticando, na verdade, o português formal e a compreensão textual. Hacks como este devem ser utilizados, mas sem prejudicar o que é importante.

(Exemplo de mapa mental retirado deste site.)

For many years, I have used a software programme called Mind Manager from MindJet and it is brilliant with loads of uses. My feeling though is that is mainly a visualisation tool and, as such, it maps the conscious brain not necessarily the mind. I will continue to use it for some business applications.

To build the new Unleash the Book Inside Home Study Course, I thought I'd try Tony Buzan's iMindMap software - especially as it's now in version 3 and I have to say that I am a big convert.

Apart from allowing me to generate visually stunning graphics for the course, all the beta testers report that they really understood the concepts I was getting across. It appears that these maps, coupled with the brain entrainment audio I am using, are being integrated at the unconscious mind level - which of course is just great for learning.

Furthermore, people seem to be getting amazing results from using the guided visualisation that embeds the mind map in their neurology. I suspect therefore that the 'learnings' are leaking into the minds beyond too.

My view is that for anyone engaged in a creative process, you should seriously consider using iMindMap. As you can get a free trial, there nothing to lose anyway.

And if you purchase the Home Study pack 3, I've bundled all the mind maps used in the creation of the courseware.

Get your copy today and become a published author the easy way.

I will then teach Pomodoro Technique more thoroughly. This includes practices which I don't have time to mention at the seminar, e.g. estimation activities and how to improve the process. I will also talk about other techniques that fit well into Pomodoro Technique like Mind Mapping. Briefly, I will go through how-to's of similar methods, e.g. GTD and The Unschedule.

The course is one full day at Informator in Stockholm 13th November. You can register already and perhaps you better hurry up. The seminar was almost immediately fully booked. How to register and details about the course is here:

• http://www.informator.se/Product.aspx?ArticleNr=T2854

If you are an aspiring author, this will blow you away and give you the boost you need to get writing and in print.It is the online version of the successful workshop that we've been running since February this year to rave reviews.

There is no other creative writing course like it as it deals with the art and science of how to tap into your creativity and how banish writers' blocks forever.

By the end the exercises, we guarantee at least one book will be unleashed from inside you.

You can get it today at the pre-launch price of the course from only £33. The course also includes an amazing MP3 visualisation to embed your book in your cellular neurology

Note that the official launch of the course is the 16th October to coincide with the Guildford Book Festival - this is your chance to pick up the course at the pre-launch price.

Get your copy today and take the next step towards being a published author

Choosing the right tools is essential to developing a good writing strategy. This means choosing tools that enhance your ability to think, organize, and write without getting in your way. You can find more information about such tools on my personal wiki. My focus has been on the Macintosh, which I used to write about for my now discontinued blog, On My Mac, but I include links to applications for Windows and other platforms where possible.

I was hoping to get my hands on a copy of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Second Edition because I wanted to read his perspective on presentations before designing a lesson on teaching with presentations.  When I discovered that the copy at my local library was in the reference section and not available for checkout, I decided to return another day to read it and selected Tufte's Envisioning Information in the meantime.

Envisioning Information examines the effectiveness of various solutions to the problem of displaying multivariate data in 2 dimensions.  Tufte suggests that some of the more successful solutions involve one or more of the following

• small, multiple images
• layering and separation of data
• micro/macro displays

Tufte also sprinkles advice and warnings throughout the book.  For example, in a vertical list in a tabular display, you should put high impact information at the top and bottom.  He lectures against "chartjunk" and the posterization of data, which he describes as data-thin graphs hiding behind cute concepts.

Envisioning Information is a quick read filled, as you might expect, with numerous images.  Still, I found the book thought-provoking, especially in the early chapters.  On page 34, Tufte asks rhetorically, "Who would trust a chart that looks like a video game?"  He raises this question in relation to a discussion of chartjunk and data posterization, and I expect he meant readers to think "No one!" when they came to the question.  However, I found myself thinking, "I might . . . depending on which video game you're talking about."

On page 31 Tufte states, "Unlike speech, visual displays are simultaneously a wideband and a perceiver-controllable channel."  In contrast, Tufte describes speech as linear, nonreversible and one dimensional.  Would Tufte argue that written or recorded speech is still linear, nonreversible and one dimensional?  I'm not sure that I would.  Perceivers can rewind recorded speech, or leaf back through a book.  Hypertext and hypermedia do not necessitate a linear flow of information.

On page 32, Tufte praises an example of a compact display of 1,826 days of weather history and then states  "Emaciated data-thin designs, in contrast, provoke suspicions and rightfully so about the quality of measurement and analysis."  Do "emaciated data-thin designs" really "provoke suspicion".  I think perhaps they should, but I believe that the majority of the data displays that most people experience are data-thin.  Additionally, many data-thin displays are housed in familiar display templates such as pie charts, tables, and bar graphs.  At first glance, I found some of the data-rich designs that Tufte presented to be unsettling because of their unfamiliar format.  On further inspection, I was able to unlock the keys to the information contained, but I found myself wondering; how many people have a greater suspicion of an unfamiliar data-rich format than of a familiar but data-thin format?

I also noticed that many of the designs that earned Tufte's harshest critiques bore a marked similarity to my memory of the charts, tables, and bus schedules on the standardized exams for basic literacy and numeracy that I took in ninth grade.  According to Tufte, these information displays were difficult to interpret because of poor design.  Is it fair to test children on their ability to interpret poorly designed information displays?  I'm not sure, but I fear that the ability to interpret poorly designed information displays may be a vital skill in the "real world".

It may seem like hubris to mindmap a book entitled Envisioning Information , but I attempted it anyway.  My scribblings violate some, perhaps even many, of the principles that Tufte was trying to communicate in his book.  However, the purpose of my mindmap differs from the purpose of the information displays that Tufte critiques in his book.  The primary purpose of my mindmap is to help me organize my thoughts and impressions, while the primary purpose of the information displays discussed in Envisioning Information was to communicate data.  I post this here mostly for my own future reference.

With this I can grow my project structure AND share it with my co-workers!
Excellent ;)

http://www.mindmeister.com/

Here is a video explaining how it works:

And just now, while sharing this info in this post, I found something EVEN MORE EXCITING!!!  iMindMap, from the very inventor of Mind Maps!!!!

Although it is not a free service, it sounds interesting!  Take a look at this video:

Wish you enjoy it!

Victoria Vives Khuong
http://3vprototype.com
http://www.myspace.com/victoriavivesfuego

RELATED LINKS:

Mind Meister: http://www.mindmeister.com/
GTD Getting things done: http://www.davidco.com/
iMindMap: http://www.imindmap.com/

I guess that's where mind-mapping comes in.  I've never felt like I quite "got" mind-maps.  I like the Flash aspect of them, of course, and enjoy clicking and moving around within them, but beyond the minor diversion, I didn't see a place for them.  Maybe I just don't think this way?

Lisa Metzer's IL Resources mind-map is giving me an opportunity to revisit mind-maps, though.  I'm enjoying the experience of seeing all these tools (conferences, listservs, blogs, podcasts, open source software, rubrics) in one place.  I'm finding resources I had forgotten about (MERLOT!) and plenty that I have never seen before.

We get exposure to a lot of these resources in a lot of different ways, and many of them have been compiled in single places for easy access, but seeing them spread out before me like this is pretty cool!

(Thanks, Jason!)

2008 05 IL Resources

That’s what reminded me how much most of us, writers included, hate our 8^th grade English teachers. In the pursuit of teaching us how to write the perfect five-paragraph theme, he or she was often the one who introduced us to the “outline”—that Roman numeral bit of antiquity that works a whole lot better after the piece is finished than while we’re trying to organize it. (I remember learning how to do an outline by studying the structure of finished writings, most often by professional writers, which just seems to buttress my point.)

So outlines are rarely the tool of choice when organizing material, but there are alternatives to a) making a list (and obsessing over it way more than twice) or b) just plunging into writing without structuring the material, which is a little like trying to do a do-it-yourself home improvement project without measuring anything.

I’ve found 3 structuring techniques that go beyond the humble list method, give your writing a visual boost, and can even prepare your finished piece for a world beyond print.

Tool #1: The Mind Map

Popularized by Tony Buzan, mind-mapping has spawned a cottage industry of software that will take your thoughts and provide a visual display of relationships between ideas and where the linkages are. It’s sort of like a 3-D list.

Here’s a link on Tony’s site to a mind-map of a concept from a book by Edward De Bono, Six Thinking Hats.

And here’s a very interesting Flash-based instructional mind-map on how to use mind maps to write an essay.

A related type of mapping is Idea Mapping, based on a book of the same name by Jamie Nast. Her blog has great examples of conceptual maps from a variety of contexts, including maps of books.

The greatest advantage of mind-mapping a nonfiction story is that it makes the whole process less linear, and helps you see multiple relationships between topics and sub-topics in your story. As an editor, I often mind-map as I brainstorm story assignments for my writers; as a writer, it’s been an interesting way to supplement the “list method” of organizing my stories.

Tool #2: Storyboarding

I heard the wonderful journalism instructor Jacqui Banaszynski lecture three years ago at an editor’s conference, and she asserted that the generation coming of age write now has a far more visual, cinematic imagination. She reported that her college students at Mizzou have responded well when she asked them to plot out their nonfiction stories by conceiving each element in a narrative as a “scene.”

Taking that concept one step further is using storyboards to structure one’s writing. Borrowed from the world of filmmaking, storyboards force you to do several things with your writing:

¨ You have to determine a story arc to your material

¨ You have to be explicit about what point of view you are using in your writing, and how and why you shift it during the story

¨ You need to conceive of anecdotes or reportage as scenes, with a beginning, middle and end, that serve to drive the larger story forward

¨ You have to pay attention to the visual and kinesthetic elements of the scenes you are recounting

As one might expect, fiction writers have discovered how useful storyboarding is to their writing. For nonfiction writers, storyboards can help keep a large “cast of characters” organized, reveal gaps in information, uncover points where lesser storylines threaten to derail the main thrust of your article or book, and provide an easy at-a-glance reference for a long manuscript.

This newsletter article from a romance writers group discusses several ways to create a storyboard for a written piece. Lightning Bug’s article on storyboarding is also good, especially because it demonstrates how simple the pictures can be and still be effective. Frankly, spending time creating beautiful graphics isn’t the point—if you can understand what you sketched later, that’s enough!

Tool #3: Wordle/Tag Clouds

One last tool that can help you see patterns in your research is the concept of the tag cloud, which provides a visual representation of the frequency of words or topics in a given piece of writing. Popularized by blogs, tag clouds can be an aid to a user’s search of a site—if a tag that matches their search is big enough, they may be enticed deeper into an online site.

For those of you unfamiliar with tag clouds, here’s one from my delicious.com feed.

Wordle is another interesting tool for finding patterns or repeating elements in your writing. It creates word clouds that look and function much the same as tag clouds.

Here’s an image via Wordle that was created from a newsletter article I wrote a while back about persistence and creativity.

My suggestion for using Wordle to structure your story is to do a free-form brain dump on your material, up to 500 words long, then drop the piece into Wordle and see what patterns emerge.

]]> http://lifestyleproject.wordpress.com/?p=164 Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:18:56 +0000 Chris http://lifestyleproject.de.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/tools-for-productivity/ This your kind of thing? Please think about subscribing via RSS or eMail (it's free). Thanks for taking the time to visit! Chris

"What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter." Peter F. Drucker

There are various types of tools that can help you in your quest to be a super productive being. They enable you to be put into practice the skills and techniques of a productivity. Tools to fulfill these requirements are increasingly being developed and refined with more and more becoming available everyday. If you are anything like me, you'll probably enjoy discovering and trying these tools. But beware - this is essentially procrastination and you'll probably try and justify 'sharpening your system' as productive work, when in fact getting stuff done is far more effective.

In this post I'm going to look at the key 'Tools of Productivity' that I have thus far identified. I have identified more that this, but in the interest of elimination and simplification seek to present the essentials.

Planning Tools
Remember to begin with the end in mind. In others posts I have either or will describe how planning is a great skill of a productive and effective person. I'm not using this to tell you why you should be planning (I'll do that in another post). Just be sure that you have the right tools available.

My preferred planning tool is mind maps on paper. Paper is not constrained and this property along with mind mapping allows free flow thinking and amendments. Remember though that papers tools are not automatically backup up like online tools. If you want to try mind mapping online there are loads of free sites. I've tried MindMeister and is seems good.

Other planning tools: Lists, Planning software (for example MS project) I find many tools to complex for most purposes except where I am forced to use it in a professional context.

Lists
I'm a big fan of lists. I keep lists for everything. Things to do, music to buy, dreams (places to go), checklists for planning etc. I find that simple is best so I keep lists in a fairly linear fashion. However, as my lists are important to backup my brain. It's best not to store information in your brain for a number of reasons!

I was using Gubb for my lists, but I have recently switched to Zenbe on the iPhone, and it is great that it is synced to a website for backup piece of mind.

At work I still haven't found the right list management system for me. I'm currently using excel for it's sorting facilities as I manage a team of people and deliverables it is quite useful for this.

Another thing to note is that I do not use Outlook at work for my to-do list management. This is for a very important reason. To keep me out of my email!

Calendar / Reminder System
You should try and schedule as much of your activity in a calendar system to enforce deadlines and make sure you do it. Notice how if something non-important is in your calendar like a staff meeting then you still give time to attend? Make the same commitment to personal high importance tasks.

For work I use Outlook , as it is the standard at my place of work. You can do fancy stuff like colour code etc. but I've been there done that and spend the wasted hours maintaining it with the false belief it will make things easier. For me simple is best.

For personal calendar and remind I use iwantsandy.com. I love the interaction element of this tool and I have written a review of iwantSandy here. I think that it is important to enjoy using your system and that is what Sandy gives to me. I am looking to move more of my system to Sandy as more features come available, as having everything in one place is food for the interests of keeping stuff simple.

Outsourcing / Delegation
These are great tools for getting stuff done but do require time and patience and learning for using as an effective tool. You should think of delegation at work (and personal outsourcing as appropriate) as you first option for every task. This way you can eliminate as much as you can. "Can't someone else do it?" - make this your Mantra. See my other post on delegation.

Against the recommendations of GTD I do keep separate work and personal systems. Both of my systems are accessible from both places. I don't want them to overlaps to that I can concentrate on the different contexts of work and home in isolation when I need to.

Email
I will write an separate post about this, but seen as email and internet are the biggest distractions in the modern workplace it is worth using the tools available to maximum benefit. Make email your slave not your master.

1) Auto-Responder - Set an out-of-office so that you can dictate when you check emails.
2) Filters - I have a CC folder for mails I am copied on which means that when I look at this folder I approach with the different mind set. I also use a waiting for filter, so that when I send an email I have @wf in the email so my filter puts a copy in my waiting for list.
3) Delete Key - Use it
4) One inbox - Email is great for capture. If someone asks you to do something say 'can you send me an email so I don't forget'
5) Turn off notification popups - if you don't see the popups you'll be less inclined to dip in to your inbox as often.
6) Turn off Auto Send/Receive - you choose when you want to get emails.

So these are the key tools in my current Productivity arsenal. I'm sure that I'll review this post and refine it and it is something that I could go in to a lot of depth about. I wrote this post in draft a few months ago, and in that type my system has evolved and changed - I am coming to accept that this is a side effect of the productivity culture.

This post will eventually form part of a series on Productivity: Tools, Skills & Techniques.

-------------

Thanks for reading.

I hope you enjoyed my post. I'd love to hear your comments below or get a Digg or Stumble!

But what if the person is a complete novice to the world of analytics and you don't have a relevant demo cube that you can demonstrate, what then?  I guess, you could start by first trying to fry the victim's user's brain by explaining the concepts behind multi-dimensional spaces and/or a quick intro into the world of de-normalised databases, with examples of snow and star schemas. The glazed look in the eyes of your audience may however suggest this doesn't always work.  And it's not just business-users who have problems getting their heads around cubes, many programmers also have difficulty the first time they're exposed to OLAP concepts.

I've found that Mind Maps offer a good way to help both me and the client to visualise the domain model that a cube will eventually address; having worked through the mind mapping process it's then easier to take the user with you as you translate this model to a physical cube or star-schema.  Well Hugo (who's back blogging after a long absence) promises to take this method a step further, his modifications to FreeMind will allow for the export of a mindmap as a Palo cube!  Check it out ...

The ThinkingRock software supporting the GTD methodology, the FreeMind software supporting Mindmaps and MS OneNote supporting well...collaborative notes. TaskJuggler came as a close fourth on personal taste but I have the perception of it being too geeky for the general audience to catch the concept. All three of these software alongwith their methodologies have individual strengths and weaknesses and these are subjective based on interests, one's educational and professional background and capabality of usage. although all three are pretty intuitive and takes no time to get going, there are several opposing communities of users whose preferences of their choices conflict with one another.

Here I will present to you my perspective of how I organise myself better or just perceive to be better organised!

1. FreeMind (Free):

Mindmaps were used by people as early as Aristotle as a way to represent things immediate to mind. Psychologists say that on average, our mind can keep 7+-2 concepts in mind at a particular time, sort of saying our cache can hold that much concepts. Some of us find ourself stressed out by the burden of having more than 9 items simultaneously which results in stress, incorrect judgement and inconsistent decisions. Mindmaps is a simple, intuitive way to organise concepts immediate in our minds in a tree-like structure whose depth can be controlled depending on our context. Here is a typical mindmap made in FreeMind, an opensource tool which provides many rich features than anyother commercial mindmapping tool out in the market.

2. Microsoft OneNote:

Microsoft introduced OneNote as part of their Office Suite since 2003 and while it gained popularity in Office 2007 onwards due to the tighter integration with Outlook and Word and also due to the licensing and distribution changes (now ships with standard Office Suite), it still remains to achieve a regular membership  of the Office family for years to come. The strong point of OneNote is its real time collaborative features which gives it a shared whiteboard feel which can accommodate most media types, text, images, video, audio, Office objects (visio shapes, excel sheets etc), handwriting (for Tablet PC) and a good flexibility for use the writing area like a physical scrap pad. What it lacks though is a systematic structure of representing information which can be good at some scenarios. Unlike FreeMind or ThinkingRock which are backed by particular knowledge representation schemes, OneNote is for the free souls to use as they please.

This approach suits many individually but cant be relied upon in team based project sharing and collaboration. Although OneNote pretends to present well organized templates, it actually does not do much more than enter default bulleted "flat" text.

3. ThinkingRock (Free)

This is a very well made software following the Getting Things Done GTD approach of David Allen whose main mantra is context. Our daily routines see different contexts which includes our location, our moods, our energy to do different type of work at different times of the day. This adds up to the philosophy as used in Mind maps as well that the less thoughts one can have at a particular time, the more creative and productive he/she can become.

ThinkingRock automatically hides all tasks and thoughts not in one's current context and allows a self-adaptive task priority utility in which least prior activities after some time automatically become activities to complete ASAP. This would let one to eventually complete all tasks regardless of priority and not forget even the smaller things in life.

As a PIM (Perosnal Information Management) tool, ThinkingRock is a clear choice over the other two but as a single point of reference for managing thoughts, scraps, and time, OneNote and FreeMind can be used instead. For teams working on collaborative work, there is no comparision to the features offered by OneNote. In essence, to use the best of breed, one has to use atleast two of these products simultaneously until their intergration is developed. There is already some collaborative features available on FreeMind and the development is very active which is a sign of better things to come. This gives an edge to FreeMind over OneNote, while ThinkingRock can be used solely as a PIM.

I decided to read Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition by Everett M. Rogers and Everett Rogers after seeing Geoff Sheehy mention it on his blog a while back.  I figured if he found it relevant to his research into knowledge management, maybe I'd find it relevant as well.

Clicking on the image will take you to the concept map page, created with CMapTools and hosted by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the software's creators. Publishing there and creating this web page is as easy as "Save as" (literally).

For some us, Mr Watson included, this is quite a new ways of doing it.

Here are some examples of Mind Maps on how to create a Mind Map:

They are from: Tony Buzan's Mind Map Website

Can you think of other ways that they might be useful?

Mr W.