In a recent Mindjet webinar, marketing expert Roger C. Parker shared his personal productivity tips for working with MindManager. During the hour-long webcast, he explained the cornerstones of personal productivity and the strategies he employs to get a remarkable level of productivity out of MindManager.
During his presentation, Roger outlined how tools, templates, training and shortcuts are the keys to his personal productivity. He characterized MindManager as a "working environment" that permits a trial and error approach to refining your ideas. "It enables you to create mental hooks for ideas, and to break big ideas into bite-sized chunks," he explained.
A big part of how he works with MindManager involves the use of templates, which he has created to streamline much of his writing and consulting work. Templates don’t just define text styles, colors and other design elements of your maps. He emphasized that they are also templates for content. He shared several examples (including the one above right) of how he designs "starter" maps, with main topics that represent the essential information that needs to be collected for an expert interview, writing a book or other type of project. These topics serve to jog your brain at the time you’re implementing a project, and enable you to work faster and more efficiently, with less stress.
Roger showed how the MindManager 7 quick access toolbar (the skinny horizontal icon bar just above the ribbon toolbar) can be extensively customized with the commands you use most often. It can also be moved below the ribbon bar, to make it easier to access. Who knew that you could do this? I didn’t! To customize it, just click on the down arrow at the right end of the quick access toolbar.
Roger is also a big fan of keyboard shortcuts as time-savers. This includes not only universal Windows shortcuts like Ctrl-Z for undo, Crtl-X for cut and Ctrl-V for paste, but also program-specific ones (and MindManager 7 has a whole bunch!). One of the most practical is Ctrl-F1, which toggles the ribbon toolbar on and off. This immediately opens up more screen real estate when you’re working with large maps. If you use this tip in combination with the customized quick access toolbar, you may be able to work most of the time with the ribbon toolbar hidden!
Roger C. Parker is one of those people who has figured out how to integrate MindManager at a very deep level into their daily work – and has increased his productivity by an order of magnitude as a result. I strongly encourage you to view this webinar!
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