Happy friday! Away from the market a bit and into the tools department. I have been using MindManager Pro 6 from Mindjet for about 3 weeks now and I find it has really increased my productivity.

For those of who don’t know, I am big fan of the GTD approach from David Allen and I found that using MindManager was a great way to capture brain dumps on a specific project. I was using flat files before this but MindManager makes the process a lot easier. I can now dump my ideas in a complete random fashion, as they pop into my head, and organize them in a neat map later. For example, here is a map I used to store my trading related research info (this is sample only, I may another map to actually share the research info later):

But it is not only for business or professional information. Sometimes it’s the little things nagging at me that I try to get rid of. For example, here is a map I created in 2 minutes to clear my head all the things related to my 4 year old’s birthday party: Some of the items of the map are hyperlinks to webpages where found information or links to emails that where exchanged about the party. I now keep MindManager open about 90% of the time. Since Internet Explorer, Excel, Word and Outlook now have a MindManager toolbar, it makes exchanging information really easy. If I am browsing for cake recipes and I find one I like, I hit the MindMap button and a link is created in the current map. If I reading emails in Outlook and one comes about a specific project, I can click the MindMap button and a link to this email is created in my current map.

Overall, MindManager is a great way to collect and organize thoughts about a number of things. It gets two thumbs up from me.