Using MindManager to Organize my Work

Over the last 8 years or so I've developed a system of managing my work that works for me. I use a piece of software called MindManager, which builds on psychological understanding of how humans organize ideas. I find that it really works as a tool for brain dumping. And I also use it to track my workload. They have academic pricing, but it does cost real money. Still, I find it is an absolutely invaluable to for managing both my work and my anxiety about my work. Probably the anxiety even more than the work, if I am honest.

For each year, I make a MindManager map that looks like this:



I'm only showing the top levels of each branch (which MindManager will do automatically) to protect my privacy, and because you'll fill it with your own stuff anyway. I have hyperlinks for each month that will pull up the MindManager map for that month. Here's an example:



Finally, each week is also hyperlinked to its own map, so I can track at a weekly level:



I use the daily items for two purposes. One is that it shows me my meetings and deadlines. But the other is that I am using it to get a better handle on how long it actually takes me to get things done, so that I allow for that in my future planning. It also helps me to concretely answer the question "where did the time go".

There is also a natural tendency to do an end-of-week and beginning-of-week review as I open or set up the Map for that week, also at the end of the month, and at year end.

I also have project-specific mindmaps that show me things like research design, links to research tools, track collaborators and conference presentations and publications that are tied to a particular project. I sometimes use it to display hierarchical representations of complex analyses so I can see patterns at multiple levels.

I get no kickbacks for this, I just like the software. A lot.