Selasa, 25 Januari 2011

Refresh your ResultsManager Dashboard 60% Faster

Happy New Year everyone.


First comes Black Friday, then Cyber Monday, and then GTD Sunday, the first Sunday after the new year when GTDers try to climb back onto their systems and do a reasonable weekly (or yearly) review.


The key to successfully using ResultsManager for GTD is to always have the output of an up to date Daily Action dashboard at your fingertips. One the best things you can do to achieve that is implement the "Put it in front of the door" scripts for scheduling regular dashboard refreshes and for emailing your context lists to you email account and smart phone. I hope to put out another blog post on that "someday" soon. I'm also hoping to summarize the steps needed to get Outlinker working with OutLook 2010. If you have questions on either of these topics just post a comment anywhere and I can try to help.


In the meantime, I wanted to share a new trick I've been working on to facillitate faster mid-day dashboard regeneration. Coming into this exercise my home dashboard refresh time was about 4:25 on a fairly fast 64bit desktop. My work laptop dashboard refresh was over 7 minutes when disconnected from the large network of shared group maps and probably on the order of 10-15minutes when connected (I didn't have a chance to time yet). For me, those wait times are just a bit too long and discourage me from doing the map mark up neccessary to clarify my priorities and commitments mid-day if I haven't had the dashboard automatically refreshed (particularly on my laptop).


On my home system, ResultsManager was scanning 1459 Activities found in 4267 Topics spread over 191 MindManager maps it needed to scan. You can check your situation by looking at the notes of the central topic of your daily action dashboard. Many folks probably don't have that many maps, but many are probably working on slower computers and also face the daunting wait for dashboard refreshes.


It occurred to me that after having used ResultsManager for several years, my active next actions were probably only coming from a small subset of the maps being scanned. I occasionally use the Multimap checker to remove some completed maps from the network of maps scanned and to clean up broken links and wanted to take that further to see what could be accomplished.


As it turns out, my home dashboard is only drawing active projects and next actions from 37 (20%) of the 191 maps being scanned. By generating a temporary map central that points just to those 37 maps, I found I could cut my dashboard refresh time down from over 4 minutes down to 1:40. On my un-docked work system, it reduced refresh time from 7:15 to 4:50. I anticipate a much larger docked improvement.


Gyronix may be able to leverage this strategy into future versions (I've shared the idea with them), but in the meantime, I will walk you through the steps I went through to achieve this and the new macro needed to identify the active maps.


1. Generate a daily action dashboard from your main map central and time how long it takes and note how many maps are being scanned.


2. Copy and past the text from the new macro "ao_tempmapcentral.mmbas" from the MindManager Macro Library into a text editor and save it into your "My Maps\AO" directory. If you are reading this I'm guessing you have already used some of the tools on the side and have that directory. If not, just download the "ao_common.mmbas" file and put it in same directory you save this macro into. I haven't put this into the setup program yet.


3. Open your daily action dashboard and remove the "In-tray branch. The intrays will lead back to inactive maps. You may want to just remove this branch from the dashboard template permanently if you don't make active use of it. To do this, just open your daily action dashboard, click on ResultsManager tab and "open template". Delete the in-tray branch and then save and close the template. While you have it open, you may want to add %time% to the central topic so you can see when you last refreshed the dashboard.


4. Run the macro on daily action dashboard. It will create a new map (My Maps\tempmapcentral.mmap) and generate a minimal set of links to point out to the maps that are active in your dashboard today. You don't want to use this temporary map central long term as new tasks with future start dates may become active on maps it skips over.


5. You can generate a daily action dashboard on this map and will likely see some speed improvement. Give it a try. Unfortunately what you will likely see is that ResultsManager will end up scanning more maps than listed there due to links from these maps out to inactive maps.


6. In order to avoid ResultsManager from searching these inactive maps, you need to next run the ResultsManager multimap checker on the temp map central. This will provide a picture of where ResultsManager is going. Make sure you check the option for "Show maps with completed projects".


7. Filter the map using the Power Filter to focus in on the maps that are done. Create a subdirectory called "done" whereever they are and move them there. That will break the link to them from whereever ResultsManager is finding them and give you a sense of accomplishment.


8. Filter the map for broken links and fix or remove them. This is just good housekeeping and probably speeds things up a bit as well.


9. Filter the maps for the "is referenced more than once" marker and track down the maps that are being linked to from multiple places. This will eliminate need for ResultsManager to have to deal with the extra links and help with the next step.


10. This is the big one. Ideally you want the network of maps that shows up in Multimap checker report on your temporary map central to be only 1 layer deep. You don't want ResultsManager's search to leak out to networks of inactive maps based on a link in one of the active maps. You want to track down these links and block them with stop icon or remove them. In order to do that, but still have them be found when you do a full dashboard refresh, you need to make sure they can be found from your map central. The strategy I adopted last year for that was to move away from using map specific hyperlinks but instead to link to folders from my map central. Even though I'd been doing this for a couple of years, the legacy "area map centrals" I had set up in my early years had lots of map links. In some cases I just created "My Maps\2011\area" folders and moved lots of legacy maps into them to be sure I didn't loose connections to them.


11. Repeat steps 4-7 until you get a temporary map central that yields a Multimap checker map that only goes one layer deep.


12. Generate a new daily action dashboard using the temporary map central and see what improvement you get compared to step 1 (and report in comments below).


I'd recommend you run the Next Action Analysis script on your resulting Daily Action dashboard to see what it recommends you do next. Note that you want to regenerate a full "Daily Action" dashboard every couiple of days to ensure any newly active maps are captured. We will need to explore how to make this more user friendly with scripts.


Note that you should run through the ResultsManager setup tips as well to make sure you have


Best wishes for a successful 2011!




Related posts:

  1. MindManager Housekeeping with the ResultsManager Multi-Map Checker

  2. Dashboard Refresh Speed Comparison

  3. Logging Next Action Analysis Results
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35 killed in suicide attack at Moscow airport

A suicide bomber killed 35 people and wounded more than 130 in a terrorist attack today at an airport in Russia's capital.



Russian police said a suicide bomber detonated his vest in the middle of a crowd at the baggage claim at an international arrival terminal at Domodedovo International Airport. Domodedovo is Moscow's largest airport, and the attack took place in the late afternoon, around 4:30 p.m. local time, when the airport is busy.



Twenty of those wounded are reported to be in critical condition; it is unclear if foreigners are among those killed. The bomb was designed to kill and wound as many people as possible. 'Law enforcement officials said the power of the blast was equal to 5 kg of TNT and that the bomb was packed with metal objects to cause maximum damage,' RIA Novosti reported.



Police are searching for 'three suspicious men' who may be connected to the bombing, ITAR-TASS reported. The men were stopped by police jsut before the attack and asked for identification.



While no group has claimed the deadly attack, suspicions fall on the al Qaeda-linked Islamic Caucasus Emirate, the terrorist insurgency in Russia's southern Caucasus region. No statement has been released yet by Kavkaz Center, the propaganda arm of the Caucasus Emirate.



Caucasus Emirate suicide bombers have struck in Moscow in the past. In March 2010, two female suicide bombers detonated their suicide vests in Moscow's metro, killing 39 civilians. Doku Umarov, the emir of the al Qaeda-linked Caucasus Emirate, took credit for the suicide attack two days after the blasts. In June 2010, the US added Umarov to the list of specially designated global terrorists.



Female suicide bombers from the Caucasus, known as Black Widows, have targeted Russian civilians and security personnel in multiple attacks over the past decade, including: the attack on the Nord-Ost Moscow theater (129 killed); an assassination attempt against Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov (14 killed); a suicide attack on a train in Southern Russia (46 killed); a dual suicide attack at a rock concert at Tushino Airfield in Moscow (16 killed); the destruction of two Russian airliners in 2004 (more than 90 killed); the attack on a school in Beslan in North Ossetia (334 killed); and the Moscow metro bombings (39 killed).



Background on Russia's battle against al Qaeda and allied groups in the Caucasus



Over the past two decades, al Qaeda has fought alongside Chechen rebels during two brutal wars against the Russians that are thought to have resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians and thousands of Russian soldiers and Chechen fighters. The bulk of the Chechen resistance was smashed after the Second Chechen War, but al Qaeda and allied Islamist groups continued to operate, and managed to radicalize many of the remaining nationalist rebels.



Russian security forces, backed by local forces in the Caucasus, have had success in decapitating the top leadership of al Qaeda and radical Chechen forces. After killing Ibn al Khattab in 2002, security forces eliminated his successors; Abu Walid al Ghamdi was killed in 2004, and Abu Hafs al Urdani was killed in 2006.



Russian security forces also killed Saif al Islam al Masri, a member of al Qaeda's shura and a chief financier, in 2002; and Muhammad bin Abdullah bin Saif al Tamimi (also known as Abu Omar Saif) in 2005. Tamimi served as second in command to Shamil Basayev, the military commander for the Islamic Army in the Caucasus. In 2006, Basayev and much of his leadership cadre were killed by Russian security forces.



After Basayev's death in 2006, the Chechen and Caucasus jihadists united under the command of Doku Umarov, one of the last remaining original leaders of the Chechen rebellion and a close associate of al Qaeda. Prior to 2006, Umarov had denied having connections with al Qaeda and rejected terrorist attacks against civilians. But in 2006, Abu Hafs al Urduni announced that the Chechen jihad was being reorganized under the command of Doku Umarov after the death Basayev. By November 2007, Umarov had declared an Islamic emirate in the greater Caucasus region and named himself the emir, or leader.



Russian security forces thought Umarov was killed during a raid in November 2009 that killed several of his close aides, but he has since resurfaced.



Although the insurgency in the Caucasus largely went dormant after Basayev's death in 2006, Umarov reignited the insurgency in the spring of 2009 by launching a wave of suicide attacks in the Caucasus. In April 2009, Umarov revived the Riyad-us-Saliheen martyr brigade, which has spearheaded the assault.



'Riyad [the Riyad-us-Saliheen martyr brigade] is believed to be descended from two other Chechen terrorist organizations led by Basayev, the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR) and the International Islamic Brigade (IIB),' according to the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism database. 'It has even been suggested that Riyad is simply the result of the marriage of these two groups.'



The Caucasus Emirate's most recent high-profile suicide operations include: the double suicide attack in Moscow's metro on March 29, 2010 (39 people killed); a double suicide attack that targeted police in the city of Kizlyar in Dagestan on March 31, 2010 (13 people killed); a suicide attack at a concert in Stavropol on May 26, 2010 (seven killed); the assault on Kadyrov's home village of Tsentoroi in Chechnya on Aug. 29, 2010 (16 killed); and the Sept. 9, 2010 suicide attack in Vladikavkaz (16 killed).



Russia's Federal Security Service has targeted the Caucasus Emirate's top leaders during raids in the past year. Five top commanders have been killed or captured since February 2010, including two foreign leaders.



On Feb. 2, 2010, the FSB killed Mokhmad Mohamad Shabban during a raid in a mountainous region in Dagestan. Shabban, an Egyptian who was better known as Saif Islam or the Sword of Islam, was one of the founders of al Qaeda in the Caucasus.



On March 2, 2010, FSB commandos killed Said Buryatsky and five other terrorists during a raid in Ingushetia. Buryatsky was the mufti, or religious leader, for the Caucasus Emirate, and has been described as Russia's Osama bin Laden.



On June 9, 2010, the FSB captured Emir Magas, the military commander of the Caucasus Emirate. Magas was a longtime associate of Basayev and Ibn al Khattab. One day later Russian forces killed Yasir Amarat, a wanted terrorist commander from Jordan.



And on Aug. 22, 2010, security forces killed Emir Sayfullah, the top judicial figure for the terror group who also served as the emir of forces in Dagestan, one of the most active theaters in the Caucasus.





Sources:



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Articles: Cutting Your Losses: How to Avoid the Sunk Cost Trap

“If at first you don’t succeed, give up,” is the road less traveled for leaders who continue to spend money on an acquisition they made – even though the acquisition is clearly not working out. But why, as this author asks, don’t we actually strive to create an organizational climate that makes admitting and learning from mistakes as valued as persistence and perseverance? Below, he describes four steps that can make it easy for leaders to cut their losses and save face.




See Related:




Author: Michael A. Roberto


Source: Ivey Business Journal


Subject: Management, Organizational Behavior


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OneNote for iPhone Review: Overly Simple Note Taking


Yesterday, Microsoft launched its first Office app for iOS, a mobile version of the digital notebook application OneNote. If you’ve never heard of it, it may be because you’re using the Mac version of Office, which lacks OneNote, greatly reducing the usability of the iOS app.


Microsoft asserts that “78 million PCs in the U.S. have OneNote,” which, while not the same thing as having 78 million users, is still impressive. But the pool of potential overall Microsoft Office users from Mac and PC is more impressive still. Having tried OneNote, I’d suggest it may be the “practice” Office iOS app for Microsoft, before the team attempts to bring in that larger user base through Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. But unfortunately that “practice” feel doesn’t help the OneNote succeed as an app in and of itself.




OneNote requires an active Windows Live account to work at all. A Windows Live account allows automatic syncing between OneNote on an iOS device and Windows Live SkyDrive, which then can be synced with OneNote in Office (which, remember, is only available in the Windows version). There are no other way (like email) by which to send notes from an iOS device to a Mac or PC, so cross easy syncing off your list with OneNote.


After logging in once to Windows Live, the admittedly gorgeous OneNote Home screen appears, but looks can be deceiving. On the left, the Home screen shows a list of “notebooks,” which act as directories for your notes. Unfortunately, you can’t create notebooks in OneNote for iOS. You must use OneNote in Office, or use the OneNote web app at windowslive.com. On the left are the contents of the Day-to-Day notebook broken down into sections. Think of sections as those little colored tabs on pages you might divide a physical notebook with. You can’t create or modify these in OneNote for iOS, either.



OneNote does perform well when it comes to actually taking notes, though. While OneNote can be used in landscape mode, you won’t have much screen real estate to keep track of what you’re doing. OneNote works much better, and looks just great, in portrait mode. As seen above, OneNote has options for both bullet lists and checkbox lists, as well as integration with the iPhone camera. The camera option is especially nice, as you can take a picture and have that be the subject of its own note. Apple needs to “borrow” that feature for Notes in iOS 5.


Unfortunately, even note taking in OneNote can at times be frustrating. Wouldn’t it be great if those ring binders on the left of the note indicated a potential action, like turning a page for the next or previous note? Instead, the only way you can get to different notes is by forever going back and forth through lists.


OneNote for iOS is free, for now, but Microsoft makes no promises about the future. If you want to be help encourage Microsoft to develop Office apps for iOS, get it now. If you want a full-featured notes app that really works, there’s Evernote. It’s free, but the premium service at $45 per year significantly increases what the app can do. For Mac users with limited needs, especially those with MobileMe, Apple’s Notes remains the best basic note-taking app. As for OneNote, for now it’s little more than an extension of the Windows application, better for viewing notes than actually creating, organizing, and sharing thoughts.


Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):


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Podcast #88: Quick Start to 2011

Dennis and Ross discuss the goings on in the Web Axe world, a few good articles, and a few upcoming conferences.

Download Web Axe Episode 88 (Quick Start to 2011)

Transcript coming soon.

What's New

Articles

Conferences


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eSeminar Now Available: Creating Effective eLearning with the Pre-training Principle

Each week I describe an element of Cognitive Theory of Multimedia eLearning and give examples of how to implement that principle using Adobe Captivate and Adobe eLearning Suite. Part 9 of 10 in the Creating effective eLearning Modules Series (Pre-training): http://adobe.ly/heB7vX


The focus of the eSeminar was on the pre-training principle. We focused on creating effective eLearning content, utilizing the Pre-training Principle to facilitate better learning. The pre-training principle … indicates that learning is more effective when the learner has a sufficient knowledge base upon which to build the concepts and ideas that are being learned. For example it would be virtually impossible to learn about geometry if you had no underlying knowledge of numbers and mathematical functions. Today’s session will explain the overall concepts behind the pre-training principle and demonstrate how to determine what information dependencies might exist for new learners when confronted with complex tasks. We gave particular focus to the following tools in Adobe Captivate; Rollover Slidelets.


I’ve included a link to the downloadable version of the slides (this one includes my speaking notes) and have given the usual embedded version below for your convenience.



During the session I used a Captivate movie to demonstrate many of the core concepts behind the pre-training principle. That movie is embedded below so you can tinker and see how it works. You can also download the source code for this demo here.




Below are the URL’s to the Multimedia session, along with links to the others in the series, also included are those which are coming in the future.


Available Now On Demand:


Part 1:Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules


LINK: http://bit.ly/aPCSxb


Part 2: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: Balancing cognitive load in eLearning content with Adobe Captivate 5


LINK: http://bit.ly/boLHVX


Part 3: Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: Applying Personalization to eLearning with Adobe Captivate 5


LINK: http://bit.ly/bkj7dP


Part 4:Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: The Multimedia Principle


LINK: http://bit.ly/aCHm2e


Part 5:Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: The Contiguity Principle


LINK: http://bit.ly/gvbcLP


Part 6:Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: The Redundancy Principle


LINK: http://adobe.ly/ekOKz2


Part 7:Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: The Coherence Principle


LINK: http://adobe.ly/eI4N9i


Part 8:Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: The Segmenting Principle


LINK: http://adobe.ly/dQ8ZGo


Part 9:Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules: The Pre-training Principle


LINK: http://adobe.ly/heB7vX


Upcoming:


February 9 – Making Effective Adobe Captivate eLearning Modules Part 10: Individual Differences


http://bit.ly/bvrOO6


Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will present a one hour online eSeminar for users of Adobe Captivate and / or Adobe eLearning Suite. The session focuses on the Multimedia eLearning Design Principle known as the Individual Differences Principle, which suggests that design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high knowledge learners, and for high-spatial learners rather than for low-spatial learners. Examples will focus on the use of Advanced Actions, ADA/508 Compliance, Closed Captions, Localization, Video Closed Caption, Branching and User Variables in Adobe Captivate 5.


Want to do more reading? Here’s a brief list of recommended supplemental reading:


Clark & Mayer (2007.) eLearning: and the Science of Instruction http://amzn.to/chkPuw (Links to Amazon – but this book is pretty widely available.)


A short but clear overview of the history of learning theory.

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Designing a WordPress Child Theme Using Adobe CS5

I’ve been wanting to take control of my personal blog theme for some time in order to both simplify how everything was being displayed, and to obtain a greater degree of flexibility over time. There are a lot of great themes out there for WordPress, and I’ve been fairly happy with many of those I’ve tried – but they still were not exactly what I wanted.


I decided to come up up with something of my own by creating a child theme of the default WordPress “TwentyTen”. Seeing as how I don’t need many features on here, and that “TwentyTen” is a modern design that supports all the new 3.0 features, a child theme sounded perfect. I also tend to shift these around over time, and this would allow that as well.


Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks


The first thing I did is sketch out on paper a sample of the sort of layout I was looking to create. I then created a basic measured layout in Fireworks, followed by a number of textured image segments for the navigation menu, page background, and content area. Fireworks is great for stuff like this, due to the robust texturing system available.


Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver


Dreamweaver CS5 has extended support for PHP-based CMS and blogging systems like WordPress. During prerelease, I was playing around with these features quite a bit but had actually never done any work with the final release. It’s actually very convenient to be able to view and interact with the live website files (on my testing server, of course) while designing and tweaking elements of the theme. Dreamweaver can also be enabled to provide code-completion for core WordPress functionality, although I didn’t need it in this case.


Most of what I did was remove a lot of the header stuff I didn’t need, and create a custom navigation menu along the top of the page. The rest of the work was just a lot of CSS hack and slash to get things looking right, setting up new elements, and skinning everything with my exported images. It actually went a lot more smoothly than anticipated.


Adobe BrowserLab

Adobe BrowserLab


Most of the cross browser rendering checks were done on my local machine using Chrome 8, FireFox 4 beta, and Internet Explorer 8. I have other machines I could log into and check browsers like Opera or the IE9 beta, but don’t have a way to test on OSX from my home. Anyone familiar with DropFolders knows the snails-pace I take when it comes to doing any Apple stuff… So I fired up BrowserLab and was able to check my basic design rendered on what must have been nearly 20 different browsers across Windows and OSX.


It is interesting to see how relatively similar the design rendered across browsers. The most trouble that I noticed was lack of support for my embedded fonts in older browsers. You can also see in the above image that we definitely have some shifting going on in regard to the positioning of elements on the page, but nothing so terrible to render the design unusable.


I’m very pleased with both the resulting design, and the simple, unified workflow involved in getting to this point. There are lots of little things that will probably come up which I’ll modify in the future… but it’s great to know now how very simple it will be to do so.


Check it out over at http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/!

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