The Underlying Blog

Mindview 3 – Everyone else should watch their ass

kyle776677 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:35:59 -0400

Recently (June 22… I’m lazy, remember), I had the opportunity to speak with Brandon Conrad of Matchware about their new (I’m guessing) software, Mindview 3.

First off, I like their philosophy. It’s not so much making the mind map according to Brandon, it’s what you do afterwards. Why does that ring so true with me? Because I’ve seen people make gorgeous mind maps, only to never-ever-ever-ever touch them again. Like little digital Sistine Chapels that no one ever goes into. So the philosophy is solid. They want you to see it as a business productivity & efficiency tool. Power down your bongs!

Back to my laziness… They’ve optimized the software for project management. It has a drag and drop timeline and just plain sex appeal. They’ve pimped it out with a work breakdown structure. They were sly as hell to put the timeline in there because, as Brandon says, ‘management doesn't always want to see a Gantt Chart’. It’s all so seamless that my lazy brain activator system (It looks like a smiley face death star under a microscope) gets very happy thinking about it.

To the viewer side of things, they’ve created a ‘Focus mode’ that makes topics visible in the back of the room. Personally, I tend to sit in the back when I don’t feel like contributing, so I’m not a huge fan of this feature because it takes one of my great excuses away for playing Nintendo DS: ‘I can’t see the screen’. But decent people should like it. People you can count on. The people you see in movies where it was easy to tell right from wrong. I miss the good old days I wasn’t even alive for. But these are the good old days. Fried chicken, snap. But yeah, it will get even the people in the back of the conference room talking

Further, they’ve got a solid numbering schema in their maps. According to Brandon, numbering helps people in the US where mapping is less familiar than in say, the UK where mapping is like Mickey Mouse (exaggeration). And Mindview now has a filtering function, which is a prerequisite for me to even consider using a piece of software. The interface to filter based on categories is sexy, though that word makes me think of ladies not software.

And now we come to the pimp shit, the reason I may get this Mindview software out for myself to use at times. No drumroll, I need a beat. It’s the calculation feature fool! You can put formulas in topics. And it just gets better as you can make formulas default across the entire map. You can autosum across the branches of the entire map. IT ACTUALLY MAKES ME WANT TO DO MATH! Somewhere an angel just got it’s wings.

Another prerequisite is Office integration. They’ve done a solid job here with Excel and pre-made export templates, which look damn compelling. Outlook is here as well.

So Mindview is solid with easy project management, a slacker killer of a focus view and the pimp shit calculation function. The last thought I’ll leave you with is maps in Mindview look like tasty cake (good) without doing much to them. Now, check it out and leave a comment below to let us know your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Matchware,Mindview 3,Brandon Conrad,Kyle McFarlin

Your Brain on the Brain is Better than Your Brain on Drugs

kyle776677 — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:54:45 -0400

3 months since my last blog post…Too bad I can’t fire myself.

Recently I’ve taken to using a new application alongside MindManager. That’s noteworthy, because I’m not the type who tends to play with new programs for the hell of it. It’s called TheBrain. For those of you who don’t know, it’s in essence a visual database. Why I like it is because it caters to my innate laziness. Though theBrain can be used as a full fledge data ~~suppository~~ repository (Read: Real Work), I’ve taken advantage of one killer feature that takes about 5 minutes to put robustly into place: The ability to visually navigate the folder structure of your computer.

I’m gonna make this short & sweet because the Lakers are on right now. And I’ll likely talk more about theBrain in the coming months/years. Even if you never went beyond the recommended steps below, you’ll get one helluva a lot of benefit out of theBrain from using this technique alone…

So, here are your next actions:

Download theBrain.
Install it (Duh).
Under Options > Preferences > UI, make sure you have ‘Show virtual thought folders’ checked.
Open theBrain and File Explorer next to each other. Drag one of your mission critical folders from File Explorer into theBrain as a main topic directly off of the central topic.
That’s it. Use theBrain to quickly navigate from folder to folder, file to file. If you use my VSS template set, try navigating it with theBrain. Like a Ferrari for your filing system. As Pac said, ‘Picture me rollin’.
I like to have theBrain and MindManager open next to each other. See how it works with your screen real-estate. For the record, I think these two play nicely. ~~Both companies should sooo buy me a steak dinner for believing that.~~
If you’re motivated, take a look at theBrain website, where they’ve stocked it out with learning materials. Also the blog is killer.

I hope that helps. Let me know what you think of theBrain in the comment section below. If you don’t leave a comment, my feelings will be hurt. My feelings of steel that is. Colbert forever.

A special thanks to Brian Friedlander for his ludicrous belief and subsequent encouragement that I would blog again. You win Brian.

Technorati Tags: Mindjet MindManager,TheBrain,Database,VSS,Visual Strategist,Kyle McFarlin,Chipotle,Brian Friedlander,Gyronix ResultsManager

Wallace must be drinking his Tim Horton’s to take this on:

kyle776677 — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:04:31 -0500

Before I turnoff my computer for the weekend (4 hour Workweek, oh snap!). I wanted to point you to a recent interview Chuck Frey did with Wallace Tait. For those of you don’t know, Wallace has one of the greatest minds in the visual mapping arena. If he’s Kobe I’m Lebron James (okay, the rain of arrogance came early this post). In it, Wallace makes a compelling case for a standard Visual mapping body of knowledge... Basically, if there was a central repository for visual mapping best practices, people might actually learn about & use visual mapping with some skill and savvy as opposed to the 3 generations removed from original sinnin' kissin' cousins-like usage scenarios I often see. Don't fret clients, that's before I remake you in my awesome mapping image (To be read with Stephen Colbert-like snap).

I'm in a lazy mood and that means I have a mental block to the assload of work he's proposing. He's most likely right on the other hand, which is why I come to you on a beautiful Ohio Friday (mid-30s and cloudy) with this. On the other hand, I do have 1 moment of pause: So many people go cross-eyed when they see visual maps that the only way this glorious toolkit may cross the famed chasm is to be used at such a phenomenal level by a few high-profile companies that other companies MUST follow suit or go the way of the dinosaur. I miss the dinosaurs.

Did I mention I'm feeling a little lazy? Time to go play in the gray day... so here's the link. Focker out!

Leave a comment and let everyone know what you think.

Technorati Tags: Wallace Tait,Chuck Frey,Kyle McFarlin,Visual mapping,4 hour workweek

Christmas in January with Context Organizer

kyle776677 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:20:53 -0500

Before I wrap for the evening and watch King James go ballistic on the Hornets, I thought I’d blog the piece of software I’m most excited about this year.

I’ve always enjoyed reading. And I’ve always felt an elephant was standing on my head when I would walk into a Barnes & Noble and realize there’s all of this information and no way I could ever read it all. As time went by, I understood that you don’t have to read everything to get the jist: Just get broad enough you sound competent around yuppies and know the hell out of your chosen field.

Sounds easy, right? Well, I could still probably spend the rest of my life covering visual mapping and all of the topics influential to it. Another ‘screw it, the hell with visual mapping, let’s play video games’ moment brought to you by our sponsor, ‘feeling of overwhelm’.

Never one to back down from a ~~bucket of fried chicken~~ challenge, I’ve done everything I can to learn about speed-reading and faster ways of consuming information. But still, it takes time to summarize a book into those beautiful little chicken nuggets of value. Can you tell I haven’t eaten dinner yet?

That’s why I’m so damn excited about Context Organizer, which I just started playing with tonight. Now, we all know that I’m lazy when it comes to giving product description, so I defer to Brian Friedlander’s excellent post. According to Brian:

“Context Organizer you are able to quickly get the context of attached documents as well as web sites right within MindManager 8, that are visually displayed as topics and subtopics.”

I’ll add that it also works with MindManager 7 because that’s what I’m using on this computer (Don’t get your knickers in a twist Mindjet, I’m using MM8 on my other computer. You know I’ve got love for ya! Holla.). Further, it’ll summarize a document you are hyperlinked to from within MindManager.

I summarized a website and 2 PDFs… and found that I can get immense topical value out looking through the output. In fact, I think the output from Context Organizer is very similar to what speed-reading programs are trying to get you to pick up on.

A perfect reason to do absolutely no more work tonight.

Good Night and God Bless.

You can get a free 21 day trial of the software at Context Discovery.

Technorati Tags: Brian Friedlander,Kyle McFarlin,Context Organizer,Mindjet MindManager

Chuck Frey’s Balls of Steel Prediction about the Future of Mind Mapping

kyle776677 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:20:18 -0500

My buddy Chuck Frey has balls of steel. In a recent blog post, he’s come out making a prediction that many would be afraid to: In the height of the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, mind mapping is going to go mainstream.

Yeah, and this’ll be the year my chocolate fried chicken idea gets off the ground – and funding. As Marty Crane would say, ‘you taste that and tell me that’s not better than a woman’.

So, what has Chuck been smoking besides optimism (Public service announcement to the kids: Stay in school)? Well, apparently some pretty good stuff because his points are well-founded.

Here are some of Chuck’s reasons:

The barriers to adoption are falling

Chuck’s really driving at the webified version of MindManager. I agree on this point, it’s easier than ever to collaborate with other people as the web acts as a glorious middle-person (look at that badass political correctness!).

It plays well with other productivity tools

Couldn’t agree more on this one either. The seamlessness with which MindManager talks to the Microsoft Office suite, love it or hate it, is what gives middle managers the juice with C-Level executives who think dead spider when they see a mind map.

The outlook for future growth is bright

Chuck came up with 25% growth for mind mapping in the next 3 years. I think that has more to do with the bump you get from the webified versions than from any new love of mind mapping.

Positive, growing media coverage

Chuck mentions the 2 hours saved a day by businesspeople using MindManager. If I sold MindManager for a living (I train people, it’s different), you could only shut me up about that number if you pressed dollar bills into my hand, because time is the most precious commodity of all. Next is love.

So I think Chuck has laid out a pretty great case. I see a lot of organic growth coming from the island users of MindManager within corporations.

Now for the big, hairy but…

Mind Mapping’s Real Problem

Here’s mind mapping’s real problem. I can show a mind map to a group of friends and they will near universally denounce it as ‘hippie crap’. That may not be the words they all use, but it’s what they’re trying to say. Not exactly what the publishers of mind mapping software want to hear. And then, after my friends have taken a crap on my career choice (We all give each other a hard time so shed no Kleenex for me), we proceed to play 12 hours straight of Halo. So, let’s recap, my friends think a 2.5D environment for visually organizing MEANINGFUL information is stupid, and then they are happy to spend 12 hours in a 3D world saving Earth from an alien invasion force… navigating & manipulating visual objects the whole way through.

I don’t know if I said that well enough and it’s not like there aren’t early career types who like mind mapping. But it’s a problem when the same people who use Facebook, MySpace and Twitter think mind mapping is, for lack of a better word, ‘weird’.

And before you’re like well Kyle, you and your friends are just haters…. Quite the contrary, I’m just completely awesome at using Mindjet MindManager and Mindjet Connect. I make my living (A) training people on MindManager - ResultsManager and (B) working for clients in Mindjet Connect.

Last Train Leaving the Mind Mapping Commune…

I think there’s this idea that if the sales presentation just gets a little bit better, mind mapping will finally go mainstream. Hogwash, or to put it politically correctly, bullshit. There’s nothing I love more than a Microsoft Excel graph that tells me I made more money last year. Bling bling. But the idea that you could somehow teach me to love using Microsoft Excel… LMAO. Oh no, he didunt just use IM lingo.

We as visual mappers need to watch out for being too enthusiastic. The line between meaningful customer evangelist and cult poisoned Kool-Aid pimp is more thin than many prefer to acknowledge. We need to start telling linear thinkers that it’s okay to be a consumer of visual maps, just the way many of us are consumers of linear data. You don’t have to create it to benefit from it!

Mind mapping is going to wind up like anything else. The most passionate users in the team or company will create the content. People not as passionate will be consumers and sometimes editors of the mind maps. I’ve found that more linear thinkers are often better editors of mind maps because (A) they’re not so emotionally invested (B) Their focused mind will FINISH before they move on to the next thing.

I’ve got love for my fellow mappers, but c’mon, we’re a bunch of procrastinators. We need our linear thinkers! I tip my hat if you’ve conquered procrastination. I have, and it feels like Christmas everyday.

(Hi this is Kyle’s humble side taking a slight commercial break. While he has greatly improved his desire to procrastinate, he is being an arrogant ass in the way he presents it in the sentence above. On behalf of everything that is good and decent about Kyle, I apologize.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m about to shutup

To conclude, don’t miss Wallace Tait’s comment number 7 on Chuck’s post. I think Wallace Tait, who wins the ‘Kyle McFarlin You Left a Badass Comment Award’ has it right. According to Wallace:

“I firmly believe, at the end of the day, the tools are rather irrelevant, the results are what matter.”

In response to that comment, Michael Tipper Said:

“Remember guys no-one wants the drill - they want the hole.”

Amen!

Check out Chuck’s post here.

Technorati Tags: Kyle McFarlin,Mindjet MindManager,Mindjet Connect,Chuck Frey,Wallace Tait,fried chicken,visual mapping

Happy Holidays

kyle776677 — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:21:35 -0500

Christmas – the massively commercialized beyond recognition part – is about one thing for me: Food.

Presents are just another distraction in your Getting Things Done In-Tray.

But food? Pleasant as Input and you get to read Newsweek during Output.

See folks, I’m deep like that.

That’s right cousins. You’ve been warned to clear a path to the cheesy potatoes.

Oh snap.

Happy holidays race fans!

Technorati Tags: Kyle McFarlin,Humor,Holidays,Christmas,Getting Things Done,GTD,Input,Output

Pimp My Map Parts in MindManager 8

kyle776677 — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:14:35 -0500

I liked this video recently featured by Mindjet in their newsletter, and I thought to myself, wow, what if I wasn’t too lazy to blog on a Friday?

People often ask me why they should consider MindManager 8, and Brian Friedlander hits on one of the key reasons in his video: Pimped-out map parts, in particular the new ‘Web Services’ parts. If you’re new to mapping, a map part is basically a living topic that can show you web results, files & folders on your hard drive, etc. According to Mindjet:

‘Web Services allow you to perform live online queries within your MindManager maps, using popular search engines like Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo!, just to name a few.’

Another reason to stay off drugs -coffee doesn’t count for everyone who just yelled hypocrite- and an even better reason to check out the video here.

Technorati Tags: Mindjet MindManager 8,Brian Friedlander

Nagging Works Because Nik is Blogging

kyle776677 — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:55:44 -0500

Welcome back race fans.

Over the previous months, I’ve further cemented myself as an A minus-list visual mapping consultant and a F-list blogger. Due to frequent ~~nagging~~ friendly urging from my friend Brian Friedlander, I’m back like a virus. I mean a beautiful flower. Wow, if my analogies don’t suck…

Hopefully I’ll have something original to say soon besides ‘wow, my brain is fried from becoming a pimp at Mindjet Connect’. In the meantime, I want to point you to a new blog I discovered recently, that of my mentor/friend Nik Tipler, CEO and Chief Rhino at Gyronix. I’m awesome too.

Nik has long been one of the most thoughtful minds in the visual mapping space who doesn’t blog and after years of ~~nagging~~ friendly urging on my part, Nik has put down the Halo controller and sat down at the QWERTY, the way original gangsters do it. (If you’ve never played Halo Nik, you’ve never shot a purple alien laser gun, which is one of life’s great experiences.)

You can check out Nik’s blog here.

Technorati Tags: Kyle McFarlin,Brian Friedlander,Nik Tipler,Gyronix,Halo,Mindjet Connect

Are You 'Watching' Your Mind Maps?

kyle776677 — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:22:56 -0400

Lately I've been a little bit disenchanted with my mind maps. Not because of content, just because I would create a map and often not look at it again. Also, when you work in mind mapping for a living, sometimes you just don't feel like going back into a map and fooling with looking at it. May sound crazy, yet if you map it right you've committed a lot of it to memory. I'm mostly talking about content maps... execution maps I live in. It's like the fast food employee who burns out on hamburgers. I love fast food. McDonald's is swell.

What I have been doing though, when I want to brush up on a subject, is just going into MindManager 7, clicking on the 'View' Tab, and throwing it into presentation mode. Then I can just watch the map by continuously hitting 'Tab'. It's entertainment on par with Scarface and Nemo.

Maybe all of you are doing this already, yet it feels like an epiphany for me. And I think the term 'presentation mode' makes us think that it's only for when you're showing it to other people. NOT SO. Maybe Mindjet should call it 'Sit on your butt with some popcorn and be entertained mode'. I rule. You can have that one for free Mindjet.

Much love to all of my readers. Now I've got to go watch CP3 face down San Antonio.

Technorati tags: Kyle McFarlin, Mindjet MindManager, McDonald's, Chris Paul, NBA, Scarface, Finding Nemo

Are You a Dinosaur?

kyle776677 — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:45:29 -0400

'We are all information managers, whether we acknowledge it or not, the fact that we create, manage and exchange information to gain knowledge is a testament to the human need for expansion.' -Wallace Tait-

Amen. A recent theme for me is how impossible it is to stay still: you either get worse or you get better as a recent post by my buddy Rich Schefren illustrates. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO STAY THE SAME. In the 21st century knowledge is a commodity to be managed and if you don't think so you'd better start looking for your jeans in the dinosaur department. Because if you don't acknowledge it, your competitor will... and down the line you'll hear the cannon of competition in the distance, growing louder every day.

Curious to learn what all the fuss is about? You can read Wallace Tait's Interview here:

Assistive Technology: Visual Mapping and the Information Economy

Technorati tags: Wallace Tait, Brian Friedlander, Kyle McFarlin, Information Economy, Visual Strategist, Rich Schefren