The last few months, I have been trying to get my head around all the different parts of managing our business. There are so many projects, people and events to keep track of that it’s really easy to start losing things in the shuffle. This on top of our oldest daughter starting Kindergarten along with a whole bunch of extracurricular activities, shifted our family’s collective focus and energy, and contributed to my need to get organized mentally.

I have been using Microsoft Outlook for quite a few years now to manage my tasks, e-mail, calendar and contacts, but I was starting to see the flood of information burying me to the point of ineffectiveness and even incapacitation. Outlook was no longer a tool, it was becoming a burden.

A couple of years ago, I saw someone use an outlining tool called MindManager. It was a way of organizing thoughts and ideas on the computer in the form of a mindmap. This seemed like the perfect solution, so I decided to give it a try. I started out using it to map out all the projects at work which I was a part of. I then used it to manage my daily work flow by referencing e-mails associated with each project and assigning tasks that needed to be accomplished. MindManager even had a function in which it could synchronize tasks with Outlook. And I also found a program which could access the mindmaps from my PDA called Pocket MindMap. Unfortunately, the more detail that I tried to capture in the mindmap, the further I got into micro-managing what needed to get done, and the less I found myself actually getting things done.

At around this time, I came upon a time management methodology based on a book titled, “Getting Things Done”, abbreviated as GTD. The approach was different in that it was designed to spend more time actually completing tasks rather than being bogged down in managing them. I decided to give it a try, but in doing so, I came to the realization that Outlook’s task management was unusable, and found an online task list application called Remember the Milk (abbreviated RTM). An added bonus was that RTM had a mobile web interface so that I could use it on my PDA phone as well. I first tried it out with my personal, family and church activities and have now expanded to using it for work as well. I also started using Gmail’s web interface as my primary e-mail tool, and figured out a way using flags, stars and drafts to manage my communication work flow.

I have found this method of managing tasks to be more efficient and effective. I think that at least for me, the approach is about getting away from command and control and more towards getting the simple tasks out of the way so that I could focus on those priorities that are truly important. Of course, this is still a work in progress, so we’ll have to re-evaluate after a couple of months to see how it is working.

In the process of getting organized mentally, I have streamlined my application tools by eliminating Outlook and using Gmail, Google Calendar and RTM. I didn’t start out trying to move towards web applications, it just happens that those are the best tools for the method, until desktop applications catch up or web applications develop offline capabilities. Also, web applications provide greater accessibility and availability of the complete tool set. As for MindManager, I think that this is still an effective brainstorming and strategy tool, just not so good, at least for me, as a day to day task management system.