Eric Mack on knowledge management with MindManager

In late March, Mindjet's excellent webinar series featured Eric Mack, a consultant who specializes in helping executives to be more productive through the smart use of information technology. He's also a very savvy user of MindManager, an expert in David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology and the author of a popular personal productivity blog. He spoke on using MindManager and Lotus Notes as a personal knowledge management tool. Here are a few highlights from this excellent presentation:

Personal knowledge management: Eric explained how he uses mind manager to manage his personal information space.  He likes to keep his desktop clean, free of program and file icons. Instead, when he starts his day, he launches a dashboard map in MindManager, which he uses to open all of the saoftware applications and utilities that he uses daily. This master map even contains links to specific locations within Lotus Notes databases, which he uses extensively to coordinate project work with his clients.

The Duffill formula: Eric presented a visual mapping productivity formula developed by Nick Duffill that I had not seen before, which explains with great clarity the awesome power of mind mapping for managing information.  I won't give you the formula here; you'll need to watch this webinar to learn all about it!

Big displays, big output for visual maps: Eric recommends buying the biggest screen you can afford for your PC, to enable you to view larger mind maps at a reasonable font size. He also owns an HP wide format printer, which is proved to be invaluable for printing large, complex maps to share with his clients.

Noteslinker: One of the keys to Eric's productivity is NotesLinker, a fairly new program that works with MindManager to enable an exchange of data with Lotus Notes. He uses it to create links to specific information stores within it his Lotus Notes databases. He also embeds MindManager files in his Notes information stores, which are then replicated to his clients - an easy way to share visual maps in their native form.

If you are a power user of MindManager, you'll find this session to be most interesting.  However, about 40 minutes into the webinar, the presentation comes to an abrupt halt, due to some sort of a technical glitch that happened during Eric's presentation.  Mindjet says it will re-record this session at some future date. Meanwhile, there are plenty of useful tips and techniques from which you will learn a lot!