Have any of you tried ResultsManager for MindManager (2017)

Ship69

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Hello

Is anyone here using MindManager 2017 (for Windows10) and the plugin ResultsManager from Gyronix/Olympic, which I have been recommended for GTD in the MM forums?

If so what's the difference between the Pro and the Standard edition. The Pro seems horrendously expensive!

Cheers

J
 
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Ship69

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UPDATE: It seems that the authors of ResultsManager, Gyronix are under new management by Olympic Limited and that now there only one version of the ResultsManager in effect the Pro version. It's slightly pricey and also geeky, with something of a learning curve, but I kindof like the look of it and there is a sale on so I'm going to trial it.

Watch this space.
 
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Ship69

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Progess so far.

Mindjet's MindManager is a mature product extremely good defaults in how it lays things out and it is enormously configurable.

However the huge weakness of using mind maps is that once you have 100s of topics on a sheet at once, it tends to become hard to manage.

I love a LOT about MindManager, however the hideous weakness of MM is its filtering, which is exceedingly. Although you can save filtered views there is no single-click way of applying them (it's always at least 2 clicks) and if you, like me, are likely to have 10 or 20 different filters there are lots of quite irritating things about them. e.g. You can't change the order of named filters. Plus the filtering itself is pretty basic. e.g. You either can either use OR conditions or AND filter conditions, not both at once. Either way you can't do NOTs and you can't add brackets.

The ResultsManager plugin for MM is vastly more powerful and you can write your own filter conditions. (If you can work out the syntax documentations is extremely weak) What is clever is that it can process any number of linked mindmap files to see what topics meet the filter conditions. This is a very clever idea.

However unfortunately the actual results from ResultManager are a "flat" list of topics. i.e. You lose the hierarchy from the resulting list of topics. (In fairness you can click on the topic to see where it came from but that starts to get slightly messy to do that on every task...). Worse the actual order of results that RM spits out seems to be completely random, so every topic has to be read very carefully to see what it is and where it came from. For an extremely visual thinker like me this is a mighty pain.

Also Contexts in MM are a pain because they add vertical space. And even if you do a workaround using other icons ("markers") there is no hotkey way of applying Contexts, which I find slows me down.

More later

J
 

DonDeal

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I attempted to use RM back in the day with MM 7 but never really got to take off with it. It was a bit unwieldy in terms of screen space and so on. I missed the opportunity to channel it into structured lists that can be sliced and diced and sorted and filtered and so on. It became too much to have to regenerate so much.
Now, that is many years ago and I haven't kept up with how the newer versions of MM are doing in terms of outlining, listing, exporting and so on. (MM took the enterprise route and this simply became too pricey for me. My MM 7 still works great).

I use a tool now called MLO (My Life Organized) on Windows and Android which is awesome with all the lists, views, filtering, zooming etc.. But I do miss a way to get that visual overview that a mindmap provides.
I don't think anyone has provided the combination of both yet. (Would love to hear if it is the case).

I have exported OPML/XML stuff sometimes from MLO just to take a view. But of course it is tedious if it is not an automatic thing. Even if it was just one-way from plan to visual, with EASY transfer, it would be a great help.
 

Ship69

Registered
Yes, having tried pretty well all the big names (on Windows) and I have been using MLO for about a year now. It has a huge learning curve and after much blood, sweat and tears what it boils down to is that despite being enormously configurable in most ways MLO does not handle actionable status (e.g. Active, SomedayMaybe, Waiting, Soon, Later, Paused etc) very well. There is no data field at the task level for any such "status", and any fields that you might use for such a purpose (e.g. Flag) do not Inherit there values from Parent tasks. This makes MLO almost unusable to me and although I have spent a quite a lot of time trying to convince the MLO developers about the need for such a thing they have point-blank refused to develop in this direction.

Another nice web application is Nirvana, which in addition the usual GTD statuses, unlike GTDNext (see below) it has an extra list (i.e. actionable status) that I find extremely useful called "Later". However although it looks nice and feels simple and is moderately nice to look at, it is "flat" and won't allow multi-level projects. And after a while that drives me nuts.

I recommend you checkout at GTDNext which, like MLO has unlimited hierarchies and like Nirvana has a much more sensible GTD-friendly interface that requires much less configuration than MLO and way fewer clicks to us once set up. That said, GTDNext still feels like work in progress to me because the all-important hotkeys are still slightly limited. In particular assigning Contexts to tasks is much still harder than it should be. (And this is close to a deal-breaker for me because if it is not absolutely trivia to allocate Contexts to tasks, I tend to find that I often simply don't bother with Contexts which can be is a slight disaster to my GTD discipline.)

For a while I thought ResultsManager (as above) on MindManager 2017 might be the answer. It's an extremely clever idea in that it scans mindmaps (as many as maps as you like) looking for tasks, creates a database of results, and then spits out these results into either the same mindmap or a separate mindmap. But for me it ResultsManager on MM2017 was a fail though because (bizarrely) the sort order of the of results paid absolutely no attention to the sort order of tasks within the original mindmaps. This was a deal-breaker because when you have a lot of results and they arrive in a random order this makes the results that ResultsManager creates become much harder to read. For me this is a total disaster because I like to use the sort of tasks within a map as an informal proxy for urgency, which is data which is then lost which is just a disaster. So, close but no cigar.
 
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