• We need to discourage birds from landing on the sign
• We need to keep the sign clean
• We need to keep birds off the sign
• We need to keep birds from settling on the sign

These four assumptions superficially look the same, but they have subtle differences with different implications which, if questioned, can lead to a different design conclusions. The first three assumptions above are the obvious ones, but the one that caught my attention was the fourth one: keeping birds from settling on the sign — which is different than keeping them from landing on the sign.

What if it wasn’t necessary to keep birds from landing on the sign? After mentally running through a few options, I came up with the idea of running wires a few inches over the top of the sign, parallel to the surface, but sleeved with thin PVC pipe (probably in segments). That way, a bird could land on it, but would be unable to remain upright. The sleeve would pivot on the wire, so the bird would have no way of settling on the sign. The same method could easily be applied to power lines: put loose segments of PVC around the wires, and birds couldn’t land on them without spinning on the tubes’ axes.

A few days ago I heard an interview with a forum moderator discussing his strategy for dealing with repeat trolls. Instead of banning them from the forum, he configured the server so that the trolls’ connection would time out. Rather than assuming it was necessary to confront or banish forum members, he simply inconvenienced them to the point where the frustration of posting outweighed the gratification of provoking others.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Thinking is more than problem solving. In addition to solving problems, we often need to turn our attention to understanding those problems in the first place. How a problem is framed is integral to how it’s solved.

Taking a trip to France might raise the question, “How do a learn French?” But the question, “How to I learn French for travelers?”, or better still, “What French expressions do I need to know?” narrows to the problem domain and flattens the learning curve significantly.

The essence of creative thinking is reexamining assumptions. Whenever you have trouble solving a problem, take a closer look at how you’re wording the problem, and try to identify what assumptions are going into the problem definition. Try to spell out several assumptions, not just one. It’s often one of the last assumptions that’s the least obvious, with the greatest potential for overturning.

(Photo credit: Martin Clifton)

Technorati Tags: Creativity, Thinking Operations

These are the watchwords of the internet age. And yes, they’re very real problems. It’s so easy to become distracted, so easy for irrelevant information to trickle into our environments without vigilant gatekeeping, that it’s tempting to take blocking out all input to an extreme, turning workspaces into virtual isolation tanks. Firewalling attention can be very useful — up to a point of diminishing returns.

Mindfulness vs. Single-mindedness

Concentration is one tool in a broader toolkit, not a hammer for turning all problems into nails. It’s uncontroversial that far more workers suffer from an inability to focus than a propensity to overfocus. But focus and productivity are not synonymous. Focusing on a goal is only as worthwhile as the goal itself, and mindfulness requires that we periodically reexamine our goals, making sure that they’re still meaningful in light of what we’ve learned since we first defined them.

What could possibly be wrong with single-minded focus?

Firewalled attention can be antisocial. Over time, projecting a do-not-disturb demeanor to colleagues can be efficient at the expense of being effective. Effectiveness requires forming and maintaining good relationships, not just brisk execution of tasks. Wearing virtual blinders for too long discourages others from approaching you with input you might need, and you may find yourself forgetting the option of enlisting their help instead of trying to do everything yourself.

Lack of exploration. One of the useful appeals of “life hacks” is a fascination with process. How can I do something differently? How can I do it better? How can I do it faster? What parts of the process are irrelevant to the outcome? Exploration (what Piaget called “bricolage”) is the playful manipulation of tools and resources to test their properties and discover new possibilities. By definition, the “research and development” time of exploration is inefficient, but can lead to breakthroughs in efficiency not possible by simply accelerating established routines.

Lack of context. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the central nervous system can process about 110 bits of information per second. Listening to someone speaking — a single channel of input — requires about 60 bits per second. The experience of being totally immersed in an activity, or being “in flow,” is often described as “losing” oneself, one’s track of time, and one’s surroundings. The complete focus on the activity at hand leaves no excess capacity to monitor the surrounding context.

As transcendental as that might feel, the experience can be an end in itself, acting like a drug, which might lead to spending two or three times the amount of time necessary to complete an activity. Feeling productive and being productive are often quite different. I used to catch myself spending nine hours at a time in AutoCAD, realizing that I had achieved 90 percent of my results in the first three hours. It would’ve been smarter to split my work into three-hour sessions in order to refocus.

Balancing focus

Managing attention requires awareness of two types of focus: closed and open. Anne Zelenka calls closed focus and open focus “firewall” and “flow” modes. When efficiency is paramount, firewall your attention. Close any application that’s not relevant to the task you’re working on, turn off your phone, and turn off any and all message notifiers. You might even find it helpful to put a Post-It on your monitor or desk with your current task (“Write post: The Dangers of Excessive Focus”) as a persistent touchstone.

Flow (the type described by Zelenka, not Csikszentmihalyi) is exploration, not distraction. Workers in this mode “keep their attention diffuse and agile, looking for opportunities across different projects and domains.” Here’s an example Gina Trapani described to Tim Ferriss:

As a “web worker,” by nature I embrace serendipity and tangents, and like to keep myself open to working on unexpected things that excite me, even if they’re not in the plan. For example, a few years back, during some web surfing, I happened upon a tutorial on how to build Firefox extensions. I let myself go down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and now extension development is a big part of what I do.

Keep an eye out for serendipity. This can be like trying to trap lightning in a bottle, but it’s possible to control the process to an extent by deliberately building “slack” into your work time — like the “20 percent time” Google employees are allow to work on discretionary projects. Duff McDuffee called such breaks “scheduled wandering.”

(Photo credit: Shermeee)

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Creativity

One way to cope with the brain’s lack of discipline is to keep your life compartmentalized. If a personal issue occurs to you at work, just ignore it, and if it’s important, you’ll think about it when it’s relevant. That’s a big risk to take (forgetting the odd anniversary) in the name of simplifying your life. And it’s totally unnecessary.

All you really need is a good collection and transfer protocol. If you’ve been reading Tools for Thought for a while, you probably know the drill by now: write it down, throw it in your in-basket and process it into your calendar or lists.

By what if the source material from work needs to go home, or vice versa? What about the articles you printed out for your Read/Review stack that you could chip away at in between errands? What if you’re a road warrior whose primary office is a laptop?

Using plastic travel folders

The simple solution is to create a set of semipermanent folders for collecting things on the run, schlepping things between work and home, or keeping things on you for supporting certain tasks. You can buy them preprinted from the David Allen Company, but they’re much cheaper to make if you have the labeler that no serious GTD user would be caught dead without.

Since these folders will get a lot more handling the general reference files you keep in your file cabinet, it’s better to use plastic folders rather than generic manila ones. The standard set consists of the following labels:

• In: This folder acts as your portable in-basket when you’re not deskbound, keeping any new documents, notes and receipts you collect from randomly spreading throughout your go bag. If you make your own set, it’s a good idea to make this one a different color than the rest (traditionally, red), since it will probably be the most frequently accessed
• To Home: If you’d rather not process personal items at work, or if they simply need to be stored at home, this is their temporary holding area
• To Office: Same concept, opposite direction
• Action Support: It’s usually more practical to have a single folder for any paperwork that you need to reference on all your errands than carrying separate project support folders, unless you have a lot of them
• Waiting For Support: Not one I’ve ever used personally. I just use Action Support for any actions I’m taking myself or expecting from others
• Read/Review: Technically not a travel folder, but you’ll probably make at least as much use of it in transit as you would in the office. Standing in lines is a great time to get through some of your reading material

Naturally, you can customize folders to your preference. You might want a separate “Receipts” folder instead of throwing your receipts in your In folder.

Storing and labeling

Before I started working at home, I used a three-tray setup at work: one for In, one for read/review material, and one for action support. The Read/Review folder would go, of course, in the read/review tray; the Action Support and To Home travel folders would go in my action support tray; the other folders would stay in my bag.

It’s a good idea to not only label each folder at the tab, but also toward the bottom edge in the center. Insert the folders so that the bottom edge face towards you. That allows you to see the labels clearly without getting obscured by the papers inside — you don’t have to lift the papers to see the labels. Apply some clear tape over each label to keep them from peeling away from the surface. If you really want to make the folders more aesthetic, use clear label tape with white lettering, but for me that’s overkill.

If you have any travel folder categories that you’ve found to come in handy, please mention them in the comments.

(Photo credit: The David Allen Company)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

Few things in a writer’s life are worse that staring at a screen groping for words for what seems like an eternity. Some writers can compose as fast as they can type, but most mortals’ writing process is more of a struggle. There may or may not be a way to escape the struggle entirely, but there is a way to consistently keeping the groping process from leading to a dead end. You can keep writing without being fatally stuck.

Notes from a pulp writer

10 years ago I saw a screening of Pulp Fiction where writer-director Quentin Tarantino appeared live for a Q-and-A after the film. Someone in the audience asked the impish auteur if he had any advice to keep up the daily discipline of screenwriting. “Q” swore by the tip he was given by a mentor.

He said organized his writing sessions so that, whatever the last scene was for that sitting, he would stop writing in the middle of it — not at the end. Since he knew how to continue the scene, he had no problem kick-starting the next writing session. His only task at the beginning was to finish the last scene, which was a downhill stroll. While he was typing out the rest of that scene, he would usually start getting ideas for the next scene.

This piece of advice was a godsend, since I was tasked to write eight 400-800 word articles a day at the time, and was seriously getting burned out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put off each article for the next day, but what I did do was get started on the first third or half of the ninth article. This ninth article would be the first article of the following day.

So each morning began by completing the previous afternoon’s article. The piece was, as Gina Trapani would put it, “parked on a downward slope.” The workload was the same (still eight articles, not nine), but the extra momentum changed the whole tenor of the writing process throughout the day.

Stop writing before you’re at a loss for words. Start each session with something to say.

Variations on a theme

A minor problem with this method is that you have to willingly stop yourself from writing precisely at the moment when everything’s flowing. You’re naturally inclined to want to stop when your creativity is spent, not when it’s peaking. Some days I would inadvertently continue the ninth article, then realize it was basically finished, aside from copyediting.

If this becomes a problem, use time-based or task-based quotas. In a time-based session, you write for X number of minutes or hours. In a task-based session, you write X number of words. Writers love to endlessly debate which approach works better.

I prefer time-based quotas, since they’re absolute. If I’m writing about something that’s new to me, I have no idea how long it will take complete a word count — I could be off by a factor of two or three. But I always know how long four hours takes. The examples I’ll be using are time-based, but if you prefer the task-based approach, go for it.

The Short-Time Method

First, decide how long you would ideally like to write each day. Suppose it’s four hours. Just like running, writing for that length of time daily require conditioning. So start writing one hour, using a timer (as I never tire of insisting) for the first week, two hours the second week, three hours the third week, and four hours the fourth week.

Here’s the instruction that people will ignore, since everyone wants to be Superman. If everyone was Superman, he wouldn’t be extraordinary.

If you run out of thinking before your allotted time, cut your allotted time for the next session by half. In other words, if you can’t fill an hour with reasonably consistent writing output, ratchet the session back to half an hour, then do that for a week; then double it the following week, and so on, until you reach your target daily writing time. I say “reasonably consistent” because there will inevitably be spells of staring into empty space. But if most of your time is spent staring and not writing, then you’ve overcommitted.

Rinse and repeat. If you’re still struggling to fill 30 minutes, cut the following session down to 15. Even if you can only write for five minutes initially, you’re beginning a process that all the daydreaming in the world won’t set in motion.

Knowing when to quit

It’s perfectly fine to sit and do nothing during the time you’ve allotted to write. It’s not fine to do anything else. You have to choose between being bored and being productive. In most cases, if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll get off to a slow start, then gradually gain momentum. The first three minutes of a 10-minute session might be tough, but by the tenth minute, you’re anxious to keep going.

That’s where deliberate nonfinishing comes in. When the timer goes off, you must stop writing, even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. Finish it the next time you sit down to write, and you’ll probably find that getting started and continuing is much more fluid than the first time.

If you prefer the task-based approach, it should be easy enough to adapt the instructions above. If you have a daily writing goal, like one blog post a day, trying writing the first half of the following post afterward and see how it changes the writing experience.

(Photo credit: re_birf)

Technorati Tags: Creativity, Writing

Whether you’re a writer, artist, scientist, or just a sentient human being, almost nothing helps stimulate the thinking and creative process more than good notebook — provided it’s actually used. In a recent post, Time, Attention and Creative Work, Merlin Mann issued the following warning about notebooks for erstwhile creatives:

A notebook is basically the creative equivalent of the NFL jersey you picked up at Macy’s; unless you fill it with a lot of hard work and sacrifices, you’re just a dilettante with poor spending patterns. An aspiring something.

Bottom line: notebooks are for writing, not buying. The worst practice for handling a creative block when using a tool is to run out and buy another tool. The fact that a Moleskine doesn’t have Bluetooth doesn’t make buying more of them any less of a gadget fetish. I suspect that many geeks convert to paper media to deny or feel better about their consumerism.

Let’s look at a few ways to decrease the whitespace in the notebooks that you already have.

Review your buy-to-use ratio

If you only buy a new notebook after filling the previous one, feel free to skip this part. For everyone else — you know who you are. Gather up all your notebooks and take a look at how many pages you wrote on in each one. If you moved on to a new notebook after using only a fraction of it, it’s time to reexamine either your motives for acquiring new notebooks, or the appropriateness of the notebooks you’re currently using.

Assess the usability of your current notebook

All notebooks are usable in theory, but we’re concerned with determining the notebook that lends itself to use in practice. That means it should not only encourage you to write in it, but it shouldn’t discourage you from writing in it. The standard cardboard-bound Moleskine pocket notebook, at least for me, is a great example of a notebook whose sheer elegance discourages me from writing in it. If you find yourself hesitating to put your pen down on that nice Levenger paper in your looseleaf notebook, consider replacing it with Mead paper.

After years of wasting my time and money with Moleskine and similar notebooks, I found that I wasn’t only resistant to writing in expensive notebooks, but to notebooks in general. As much as I loved the image of writing in one, the process always incurred unnecessary mental friction. There was something about writing in a bound notebook that made me feel like whatever I was wrote was going into a “permanent record.” When I switched to writing on index cards and legal pads, the problem vanished. I can compose faster on a legal pad than with any other medium.

Distinguish between jotting and drafting

We may use the same notebooks, but how we use them can be entirely different. Clarify what you use a notebook for. What process does the notebook facilitate? We have a habit of amalgamating everything associated with the writing discipline as “writing,” but there are distinct, separate processes that need to be identified.

What most of us call “writing” is actually drafting. In most cases, before you can draft a piece of copy, you have to first collect, then organize your raw material. Collecting can entail doing research, or summoning your existing knowlege. Organizing entails rearranging what you’ve collected into some kind of throughline, either an outline or at least a list. Drafting entails your initial efforts at converting your material, guided by your thoughline, into copy. Editing, of course, entails refining your copy, either through local revisions or successive drafts.

When you use a notebook for “writing,” are you collecting, organizing or drafting or editing? The notebook you’re using make be ideal for one of these phases but suboptimal or completely inappropriate for another. You might be better at collecting and outlining longhand, but drafting by computer.

Determine the best modality for working out your ideas

Back in the dot-com era I worked for a content site with a team of writers, most of whom weren’t exceptional at the craft of writing. That’s not as much of a liability as it might seem. I was assigned to write about technology news, one team of writers wrote about pop culture news, another about political news, and so on. What mattered more than writing ability per se was domain knowledge. If you read a specialty publication like “Road and Track,” you’ll notice that much of the prose is subpar, even though the information is probably very insightful. You read “Road and Track” to get information about cars, not to study article writing.

I mention this because many niche writers, especially bloggers, are too self-conscious about their composition when they should be focusing on mining their domain knowledge. Your core competency is in the ideas you have to share, not (primarily) how they’re articulated. When I read an article from Warren Buffet about investing, I couldn’t care less about his writing ability.

What does any of this have to do with notebooks? Emulating the creative process of writers whose core competency is writing (those who write on demand with exceptional skill, regardless of topic) may actually be blocking you from leveraging your strengths if they don’t involve putting pen to paper. Ultimately, you’re going to have to convert your ideas into copy, but initially, your first priority is to get collect and work out your ideas.

You might have better results with something other than a notebook, like a voice recorder. If you’re a primarily visual person, written outlines lack the schematic representation that would best facilitate the organizing process; so use mind maps or diagrams instead. Experiment to find out whether this is best done with a notebook, or a computer application like MindManager.

Try using index cards to capture individual ideas or key points prior to organizing them. When many non-writers see a full-size blank page, they feel obligated to fill it. So reduce the whitespace you need to fill. Put down one idea per card, using the smallest cards you can find.

Keep a second sheet, card or notepad nearby

Whichever phase of the writing process you’re currently engaged with, you’re inevitably going to have unrelated thoughts surface. Trying to ignore these thoughts will further interrupt your creative process, so prepare for them in advance by having a separate capture tool nearby. Write down the unrelated thoughts, and when you’re done writing, either process what you’ve captured right then, or throw it in your in-basket. For instance, I keep a junior legal pad next to my laptop.

Consider elimination

Not everything idea you capture is going to be useful, either now or in the future. Don’t be an idea packrat. If something you’ve collected is clearly not compelling enough to be developed into something more substantial later, then it’s clutter. The more clutter you have in your notebooks, the less value you’ll perceive in the collection as a whole. If 80 percent of a notebook, for instance, is uninspiring but kept on the grounds that it’s “potential,” you probably won’t be motivated to sift through the notebook to find the useful 20 percent. Collect liberally, but triage regularly.

(Photo credit: sskennel)

Technorati Tags: Writing, Productivity, Creativity

Po stands for provocative operation. Provocation is used to see where an idea or statement leads to with further exploration. Traditional logic, what de Bono calls rock logic, is concerned with “what is,” using the judgment system to determine whether or not a statement is true, or to classify something into a known category. The alternative to judgement is movement, or water logic, which is concerned with “what can be,” following a provocation is see what it leads to.

Since po is an operation rather than a noun, verb, preposition or adjective, the term doesn’t lend itself to a convenient dictionary definition. But the uses for po can be explained and described without much difficulty. The first step is to become familiar with the thinking operations represented by po, then it becomes easy to use the word in context. There are three primary uses.

Denoting a provocative statement

The first use of po is at the beginning of a phase or sentence to indicate that what follows is a provocation. Whether or not the statement is true is irrelevant; it’s only used for effect, as a novel point of departure for stimulating new trains of thought that hopefully result in new ideas.

Po urinals are installed in the ladies room has no basis in fact, but if we follow a new line of thinking that follows from this statement, something practical might emerge. Conventional urinals are shaped and positioned for use when standing. But what if we had a conventional toilet seat that functioned more or less like a conventional urinal? This leads to a new type of highly water-saving toilet (modified to accommodate toilet paper). One or two clearly marked stalls in a ladies room would have traditional toilets, as needed, while the other stalls would conserve many gallons of water.

Po cell phones have no screen or keyboard seems to have no intrinsic value, at least in the judgment system. When we treat the assertion as the provocation indicated, we look for what it might lead to. Perhaps there’s an aesthetic value. We can have a cell phone whose exterior is essentially a matte black slab, like the Tycho monolith in 2001, but with an internal screen and keyboard that slides out. For some, this design would be painfully boring; for others it would be the height of minimalist elegance.

Water flows into po wells. In this case, po is positioned within the sentence, but the function is the same: to signal a provocation. The statement uses traditional lateral thinking technique of reversal. Water flows out of wells, so we reverse the direction to see what happens. This could lead to the idea of a drip irrigation system used to reconstitute unusable soil. “Well” heads would be buried several feet into the ground, slowly saturating the earth with a mineral-enriched formula that would eventually change the soil composition. Over time, you could plant crops the soil was previously unable to support.

Note that these are all ideas I hatched in real time while writing this, not model examples. They might not work at all, or they might not work in their initial form. Validating ideas is a matter of judgment. Here, in the initial phase of the creative process, movement is a more useful catalyst. Ideas can always be developed or discarded later, but the first step is getting some raw material to work with.

Importing a random word

In Seeding Ideas with Random Stimulation, I discussed another long-standing lateral thinking technique: using a random word to reorient one’s perspective on an existing problem. We posit the random word and free associate it back to the problem. Once again, there’s no intrinsic relationship between the two objects. The artificial connection is used provoke a unique stream of thought.

We use po as a conjunction between the problem or design statement and the random word (or phrase). If the task is to design a new kind of coffee cup, and the random word is “traffic light,” then the provocation would be, “Designing a new coffee cup po traffic light,” or simply “coffee cup po traffic light.”

The common method for getting a random word it to open the dictionary and pick the fifth word (an arbitrary preselection) on whatever page is opened to, or the next word, until you reach a noun. Nouns are generally preferable for random words, due to the richer array of imagery and associations they stimulate. In a pinch, you can look quickly in one direction and use the first object you see in your environment as the random word, but this isn’t recommended. When words are selected instead of randomly generated, they tend to be selected for their relevance to the problem, diminishing the provocative effect. We deliberately look for an irrelevant word.

Here are some streams of consciousness that can come from the above provocation:

• Traffic lights . . . red, yellow and green . . . colors to indicate something . . . Put colored stickers on cups to indicate whether beverage is hot or cold
• Flow control . . . Put an adjustable iris toward the lip of the mug, which would limit splashing and spilling when twisted
• Lights have cylinders (cups) . . . multiple cups . . . modular design . . . cylinder that untwists into parts . . . Cylinder that breaks into two components: coffee cup and container for cream and sugar
• Mounted on pole . . . instead of a loop for a handle . . . Cup has a solid, small-diameter cylinder along its edge where you grip it instead of putting your fingers through it

Arresting a standard reaction

This isn’t really a “creative” application, but a practical one. Here we use po as a buffer to prevent the mind from coursing down it’s normal pathways when reacting to something. Whenever something says something inflammatory, implausible, ridiculous or simply wrong, you say to yourself “po” to suspend judgment — de Bono likens this to “instant mediation.”

Po acts as a neutral exclamation, a de-patterning cue to suppress reacting and promote futher exploration. If someone calls you an idiot for suggesting a certain idea, you think “po” to bypass the impulse to verbally retaliate. It’s an especially effective substitute response for expletives that do little more than stoke futher immature behavior. With practice, po can be used to snap out of many unproductive reactions and begin looking at a situation more objectively, as if you’re a third party looking at yourself and the other person.

(Photo credit: bounder)

Technorati Tags: Creativity, Thinking Operations, Lateral Thinking

(Play Video)

Most people who think they lack ideas might very well have the opposite problem. They may have so many ideas that they obscure each other. It’s not a problem of having ideas, but of seeing them. Once they’re visible, it becomes easier to see their relationships to each other, prioritize them if necessary, identify their central theme, find related details and resources, and eliminate the ones that aren’t critical to the project at hand. To paraphrase a business cliche, we need to work on our ideas rather than in them.

MindManager is the best known software for mind mapping — the art of diagramming networks of discrete thoughts around a central topic. Some people still prefer mind mapping by hand, since it’s faster and more intimate. But software based mind mapping has a number of advantages.

• The resulting mind maps look more professional
• They can be shared in several file and image formats
• Files and web links can be attached to topic nodes
• The user can rapidly convert maps into lists and back
• Its possible to collaborate in real time with other users

I last used MindManager 6 about two years ago, when I sold my laptop without realizing I had no backup copy of the software on it. Before long, I was actually relieved at not having it on my newer laptop, since mind mapping had become an addictive time sink. While many long time users insist that MindManager 2002 remains the best version ever, I’ve always thought that MindManager 6 had the best user interface of any piece of commercial software on Windows. Let’s see if things have evolved with Version 7.

Interface design

The first change that any veteran user will notice is the Office 2007 style ribbon interface. At first glance, it’s a love-or-hate innovation. Most users will find that it’s an acquired taste.  MindManager has plenty of features that I would be unaware of if they weren’t persistently visible on the ribbon, neatly arranged in grouped tabs.

One example of this was the Focus on Topic feature I don’t recall seeing in the previous version. If you have a node selected (what MindJet calls a topic), clicking on Focus on Topic will move the entire map to position the focused topic in the center of the document window. It may seem like a minor adjustment on paper, but I found myself using this feature constantly, since it made it easier to develop child items into more complete maps. Another happy discovery was the Balance Map feature, which arranges an equal number of topics to be displayed on either side of the central topic.

The ribbon does gobble up precious real estate. Fortunately it can be collapsed or restored by double-clicking any menu heading. For newcomers, the improved tooltips are a good way to get familiarized with the app. These tooltips typically have two or three lines of description, and they’re almost better for touring MindManager than the installed or linked guides.

Office integration

Mind mapping isn’t reserved for free thinking romantics, and MindManager demonstrates this by buddying up to MS Office in every conceivable way. Outlook tasks, appointments, contacts and notes can be inserted into mind maps, as well as ranges and full spreadsheets from Excel. From MindManager, you can export tasks into Outlook, or entire maps as PowerPoint or Word documents.

Other import and export functions

MindManager has other options for sharing maps. Maps can be exported as PDFs, as images (including GIF, JPEG and other formats), HTML pages, and even OPML files (collections of feed subscription links). Slightly more relevant than exporting OPML files is the ability to import them, so you can theoretical have a research project that gets updated with related RSS feeds.

Views

Not every collaborator will want to see your ideas in the form of a mind map. MindManager now allows you to toggle between Map View and Outline View. Outline View is also useful for exporting to MS Word or any text editor. In Map View, you have the ability to globally expand or collapse the map by one or two levels of hierarchy. One of my favorite commands is Show Branch Alone, which displays the selected topic and its children without showing the rest of the map.

The zoom level can be adjusted dynamically with a slider, but I mainly used the Fit Map button whenever my maps grew beyond the document window.

One feature that I never use, but seems to be popular with other MindManager users, is the Select by Rule tool. Topics can be selected by queries (that can be saved), map markers, task information and other criteria. This probably comes in handy for delegating parts of a project to a someone.

The notes window in Version 6 was justified to the right exclusively, which bothered some users. Now the notes windows can be positioned below the document as well.

The print options have been expanded to include headers and footers, so you’re not stuck with having the map’s central topic as the title, which could get annoying. You can also choose to print a map on a single page, or across several pages.

Formatting

You can control the growth direction of your mind map from the menu. These can be omnidirectional maps, concept fans sprawling left or right, or pyramidal org charts. You can even change the map style of your current work in real time. For instance, a standard org chart layout can be transformed into to a split tree format. If your map is asymmetrical, with more topics on one side then the other, you can select Balance Map to even things out.

One thing I keep hoping to see in MindManager is an easy way to access line patterns with directional arrows for informal flowcharting. I frequently need connections between topic nodes to express a transition of some kind, and the only software I’ve that lets me to this easily is CmapTools (which has other problems). You can do this in MindManager if you select a “Relationship Shape” — a dotted line that can be straight, curved or angled, but dotted lines have different connotations than solid ones.

Some users, usually adherents of Tony Buzan’s canon of mind mapping, are increasingly critical of the “corporate” look of MindManager’s included map styles. They might want to take a look at some of the style templates in the Miscellaneous folder (like “Circles”), and modify them with additional colors and images. It is possible to create organic looking maps with the app; it’s just not the default.

The timer

If you’re like me, and find mind mapping too good for your own good, you’ll appreciate the countdown timer tool to reign in your brainstorming sessions. It would’ve been nice to see this feature incorporated in Presentation Mode as well.

Map Markers

You can add various “map markers” to topics to denote priority levels, highlights, completion status, discussion points, decisions, and emotional values (like smileys for agreeable items). These would be great in conjunction with the Select by Rule and Show/Hide filtering tools.

Mindjet Connect

Mindmapping in the cloud with a tool like MindMeister is nice, but I prefer having any critical authoring software on my own computer, with web-based functionality as a supplement. Mindjet Connect is the company’s service for real-time collaborative mind mapping with MindManager clients, featuring instant meeting (for Windows clients), chat and email integration. Like a couple of other value-adds to MindManager, I chose to forgo testing this service to get this review finalized, but I will be review it separately in the future.

Is MindManager worth buying?

If you’re a power user of Version 6, then probably not. By power user, I mean someone who knows the vast majority of features in the software, and can access them with the shortcut keys or without much effort.

If you’re new to software-based mind mapping, and you’ve tried out some of the free alternatives (like FreeMind or Compendium), you’ll probably end up graduating to MindManager 7. It has an incredibly intuitive interface, a ton of features now made visible with the ribbon, and very tight MS Office integration. For project managers, there are a couple of useful add-ons, like Mindjet’s own JCVGantt and Gyronix’ ResultsManager.

But definitely try before you buy — it’s pricey. After the 30-day free trial, a single-user license of the Pro version is $349, and $174 for the upgrade version. Mac users, rejoice! The Pro version is $129, and the upgrade is $69.

Technorati Tags: MindManager, Mind Mapping, Mindmapping, Brainstorming

The moment we have to compare, sort or relate more than three or four factors, it becomes more efficient to track them externally, using media like paper, a whiteboard or a computer. This type of externalized thinking is called distributed cognition.

Distributed cognition is a fancy term for a simple concept.

• First, we collect our thoughts about the project or situation at hand
• Then, organize these thoughts into one of three schemes to clarify their meaning and relevance

Once we have all of our thoughts in front of us simultaneously, it becomes easier to see or define their relationships.

We can think relationally when we have persistent mental representations in the physical world to work with. When we try to manage multiple thoughts without physical aides, we’re limited by short-term memory to comparing two thoughts at any given moment. Managing three thoughts requires two comparison operations. This can happen quickly, but has operations multiply, the overhead soon becomes unscalable.

I use the word “thought” in a peculiar way — as a general term to stand for any object of our attention: an idea, a fact, a memory, a concern, a concept, or a detail. Thoughts can be broad or specific — we can think about a “bird” or a “beak.” Like a hologram, we can take a fragment of a thought (beak) and reconstruct a whole from it (bird).

In ascending order of complexity, lists, trees and maps are the scaffolds used to hold our thoughts in place while we examine them objectively. Lists are for simple overviews, trees are for hierarchical relationships, and maps are for nonlinear relationships.

Lists

These are fairly self-evident. If you want to make it easy to pick up everything you need at the grocery store, you make a list. If you want to ensure that all relevant topics are discussed during a meeting, you create an agenda — a list.

Lists come in two types: ordered and unordered. Ordered lists can be organized chronologically or by priority of importance. Lists may be unordered because they represent an initial brain dump — collecting before organizing — or because sequence and priority are irrelevant. The Beatles are John, Paul, George and Ringo, regardless of order.

The advantage of lists is simplicity. They’re intuitive to make without specialized tools or further instruction, and they’re compact enough to fit onto any collection medium — the back of an envelope, a PDA, a notebook. The disadvantage of lists is that the person making them will sometimes unconsciously populate a list using a narrower set of criteria than originally intended. A list about “rock and roll” might begin with a diverse array of thoughts around the topic (electric guitars, groupies, lyrics), then slip into a narrow array without the list maker realizing it (a list of rock stars). With trees and maps, we explicitly group thoughts under headings to prevent getting sidetracked from the big picture.

Trees

Trees organize thoughts into hierarchies, allowing us to see their linear relationships. Trees can be graphical, with boxes and lines, or they can be simply written outlines. If the hierarchy is self-evident, making a tree is still helpful for more objective examination. Writing outlines and org charts are typical examples of trees. If the hierarchy is as-yet undefined (drafting a book proposal, or an org chart for a new business), it often helps to collect thoughts in list form first, then organize them into a tree to clarify or establish their relationships.

Trees can be top-down or botton-up. If you’re planning to write a book about dogs, you can start top-down, brainstorming chapter ideas: breeds, training, feeding, and so on; then repeating the process for sections within each chapter. Bottom-up trees are for working inductively. You want to write a book about dogs, but sense that you would like it to target a more unique niche. You start brainstorming prospective chapter ideas: accessories, grooming, pedigrees, etc. — suddenly, you see a pattern, and realize that writing a book on competing in dog shows might be the way to go.

The advantage of trees is that the categories and subcategories are explicit. It’s obvious during the brainstorming process when there’s too much emphasis on one category. The disadvantage of trees is that the relationships between categories, subcategories and elements must be understood up front. It can be difficult to drop a new idea onto a tree when there’s only an intuitive grasp of how the idea relates to any of the existing categories. This is less of a problem with bottom-up trees, but maps offer more freedom to accommodate looser relationships.

Maps

Maps — a generic term for diagramming structures like flowcharts, mind maps, flowscapes and concept maps — can be used to illustrate a process, determine relationships between different elements, or capture thoughts before the relationships between them are evident. Maps can incorporate trees and lists as part of a larger whole. Some maps are strictly procedural, like flowcharts, while others are relational, like concept maps.

Mind maps, the most widely used mapping scheme for personal use, can be done on paper or computer. Many people find that mindmapping on paper is more fluid and spontaneous than doing so in programs like MindManager or Freemind. On the other hand, computer mind maps can be distributed easily, and it’s possible to attach support material to nodes if desired. A mind map for a project can double as a digital file cabinet for all relevant support materials, like documents, presentations, images and web links.

The advantage of maps is that they can include all types of elements or relationships within a project or situation. In a mind map, for instance, list items can orbit a central theme, and each of them can branch into its own tree of related details. The disadvantage of maps (some types, at least) is that it’s possible to continue free associating indefinitely and lose sight of the critical elements in the map. Sometimes it helps, after making a map, to pick out the critical nodes and consolidate them into a list, or a shorter map.

Processing and Perception

It’s common to take a problem as we’ve initially defined it and use that as the point of departure. I refer to this phase of thinking as processing. If we need to raise capital to start a business, we probably think about finding the necessary resources: banks, venture firms, angel investors and so on. The perception phase is usually taken for granted, and not thought about consciously.

If we turn our attention to how we perceive the problem, we might generate more options:

• How to we start a business with no outside financing?
• How do we convert our existing assets into working capital?
• Can we build a business entirely on sweat equity?
• Can we create some intellectual property with negligible distribution overhead?

Different problem definitions, even slightly different ones, stimulate the development of different solutions. But the initial focus is on coming up with new problems, not solutions — or rather, viewing a situation from different angles. When we do an APC, we spend some length of time (e.g. two minutes) generating as many different views as possible.

Interpretation

Last month, the number of RSS subscribers to Tools for Thought dropped by nearly half in a single day. Why would that be the case? Do an ACP for one minute on this, coming up with alternative reasons that might account for this drop.

The answer was that my RSS provider, Feedburner, temporarily stopped reporting feed fetches from Google Reader and iGoogle (they right metrics were restored a week later). But having the “right” answer isn’t the point of doing an APC; unsticking the mind from its default point of view is.

Design

Thinking is often equated with problem solving, but sometimes it’s healthy to direct thinking toward innovation and improvement, designing “solutions” for which there was no real problem to begin with. Do a two-minute APC on the design of cell phone cases. As in brainstorming, the object is to generate as many ideas as possible in the given time frame.

Strategies

Before spending too much time building what may turn out to be the wrong strategy, it’s worth spending some time dedicated to generating alternative strategies, without elaborating on a particular one. After having a variety to choose from, focus on implementing the best elements of one or more approaches.

A state agency notifies you that new emission regulations require you to bring your factory in compliance within 90 days, or pay an enormous fine. Do an APC on ways of dealing with this.

Further Exercises

Do an APC for two or three minutes on each of the following items. Using a timer is recommended, since it’s easy to get engrossed in the content of one problem and spend too long on it. For training purposes, the focus here is on form, running through many possibilities in a short burst of thinking. Remember to use all of the allotted time. Don’t stop just because you have a good, interesting or “right” idea.

• A cigarette company announces that it’s settling rather than litigating a class action suit, and the following day the stock price doubles. Why?
• Your next door neighbor constantly plays his music too loud at late hours. How can the situation be handled?
• As a dinner guest, a boy’s best friend tells the mother that he doesn’t “eat dead animals.” So she serves him a live chicken. What might have motivated her to do this?
• How could the post office make letter writing a more fashionable method of correspondence than email?
• Once opened, packaging is usually discarded or recycled. What are some ways of repurposing opened packages instead?
• Some people read the news to “know what’s going on in the world.” How else could news be viewed?
• Your debating team has been tasked to demonstrate the ways in which astrologers are more scientific than astronomers.

Technorati Tags: Creativity, Thinking Operations