Recently, I’ve been using Topicscapes. It’s a clever tool that uses the idea of a 3D landscape with cone-like objects as topics to develop ideas and helps organise material from the web and your PC. Scoop up files, calendar, contact items lying on your PC into meaningful topics that can relate to other topics. You can “fly” above and around your topics, zooming into your topics of your choosing and working on them as you please.

The great result from all of this is the ability to view all your ideas in one place with meaningful relationships.

There is a learning curve, though, as you use keyboard and/or mouse control to fly and zoom, but it really does become addictive once you have reached a certain level of comfort with it. I’ve never liked my Projects, Todo lists, ideas/thoughts, reference material as much as I do now with my colorful cones.

I have no affiliations with the developers, just a very satisfied user. Perhaps you might want to give it a whirl and see how it works for u.

Thanks for the excellent articles, I do enjoy reading them.

I use Mind Manager. It is a bit pricy, but it is very robust. It would be an expensive time management tool if that is all you want to use it for. There are many inexpensive and even free (open source) mind mapping tools out there. I’m not sure which have the Outlook integration though.

Chuck Frey at innovationtools.com has written a lot on mind mapping software. You may want to check there.

Thanks,

Steve

Just read your article on mind mapping, and formalising my mind is exactly what I need right now. However, there appears to be a lot products available. The one you mention in the article seems quite good (eg – integrates with outlook). Could you please let me know which software product you use?

Thanks,
Ben

I love that… “manage your innovation pipeline”. I’ve spent about two years trying to find a TO-DO list system that works, and have flirted with GTD for some time. I never realised that this was “managing my innovation pipeline”, sounds so much more important!

As a creative engineering type person too, I can totally relate to the problem with having goals and being organised. One of the things that’s been on my to do list ever since I had one is “write goals”. Still haven’t done it for some reason I can’t fathom. I just don’t want to I guess. However having said that I recently read an article by Mark Forster which describes a neat way to work out what you really want out of life.

What you do is once a day for about ten days write ten answers to the statement: “Something I really want out of life is…” It doesn’t really matter what you write as you’re going to do it again tomorrow anyway. Don’t look at any of the answers until you get to the end of the tenth day. You may then be really surprised what patterns you find, and how much some answers vary and which one’s don’t. And the great thing is, this is a good fun creative type game to do that gives you really serious answers and maybe even reveal your BHAG.

By the way I found out about Mark Forster after I had been struggling to try and implement GTD. The trouble with GTD is it’s a bit overwhelming… by the time you record everything you ever think about doing, the lists become massive and hard to manage. Ok for the hugely organised amongst us, but being organisationally challenged I really struggled to stay motivated to keep attending to these endless ever expanding lists, I was getting stuff done, but the lists never got any shorter!

Then I stumbled on Mark Forsters book “Do it Tomorrow” which is definitely worth reading as it simplifies a lot of day to day activity into simple rules, without the massive organisational overhead of a GTD style system. And the best thing is the main aim is to end each day with a sense of completion. Ahhhhhh…. guilt free beer.

Hope this is of help. Interesting site and thanks for the post. I like the mind map!

Andrew
http://www.RealiseDesign.co.uk