ResultsManager Update: Day 2
I received my keys for ResultsManager
on Monday and right away tried to start applying it to many of my MindManager
maps. I had a previous encounter with ResultsManager a few months back so although I am still making my way through the manual and online lessons, I still have a sense of familiarity with it.
Since setting it up wasn’t much of a challenge I immediately jumped into the ResultsManager Dashboards. A few hours playing around with these and it quickly became obvious that this is where much of the power for ResultsManager lies. These templates are what sweep through all your maps finding all your actions and organizing them into a single map that allows you to view the tasks all together that must be completed. The templates that they provide do a pretty good job but I am still finding myself having to update and change them quite a bit to fit within my personal GTD methods.
The first thing I really have to edit is the context aspect of it all. For whatever reason contexts are pretty invaluable at this moment. Most of my work is done at home, on my computer, or near my workstation. I do occasionally work or study at the library but almost anything I normally do there can also be done at home and vice versa. This leaves me with very few individual contexts at this moment. I know this is probably going to change greatly next year, when I hopefully enter the sales and business world, but for now leaving those context blank is most beneficial. Because of this I am finding the need to remove this filter from almost all my dashboard templates while still trying to get the hang of editing and customizing these dashboards. My feeling is I will really have to play around with them quite a bit before I discover the template design that is most suitable.
Currently my greatest challenge with ResultsManager is using it to gather all those little tasks that don’t belong to any real dedicated or complex project. These include things like iron pants in morning, run after work, buy dinner for Tuesday night. Normally these items would go on a general next actions list or map right on my central desktop. It was essentially a very basic To-Do List where I really didn’t have to organize, sort, or categorize it. It was usually something that would remain there for a few days and then I would be done with it and never have to look at it again so I would just delete it and make room for something else. What I feel ResultsManager wants me to do is turn these simple tasks into projects or next actions. Spending extra time thinking about these tasks, placing them in separate maps or categorizing them by filling in extra details seems like a waste of my time. However if I don’t add them as tasks they won’t end up in any of my dashboards and if I truly want to take advantage of ResultsManager, I must be positive that my system will collect every task I need to complete that day, even if it’s as simple as charging the cell phone in the morning.
My last difficulty is with appointments and meetings. It’s actually not entirely ResultsManager ‘s fault as I was often having similar difficulties using MindManager in similar scenarios. My ideal situation would have a program tell me everything that is on my plate for any particular day. To perform this magical move would require it to looks through all my maps for tasks and my calendar for appointments. MindManager and ResultsManager do a pretty good job of this, and I am sure this will improve as I gain more experience, but what they fail to track are my scheduled appointments and calendar items. I would love to run a daily ResultsManager dashboard and have it search through all my maps, my Outlook calendar for appointments and organize them into a weekly or daily map. MindManager does a very poor job of trying to manage scheduled tasks and because of this I must rely on programs like Outlook much more than I prefer. I understand why this is not an important issue for MindJet, as I really am stretching the program’s abilities sometimes, but if MindManager could somehow keep track of appointments, classes and inform me when these activities are taking place by creating the appropriate topic in a pre-assigned spot (for example a topic that has a particular date or time attached to it) it would really help me get all my tasks and activities into one spot instead of sea-sawing back and forth constantly throughout the day.
It’s really only been two days with ResultsManager and am really making an effort to incorporate into my routine. However, I still ask myself if this extra effort is really worth it? It’s a question I asked when I first started playing with ResultsManager a few months back and until I can answer with a definite YES I will continue to ponder its abilities and worth.
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