First - congratulations; you have just re-invented David Allen's 2-minute rule from "Getting Things Done". If something will take less than two minutes to do, and you can do it right now, then just go ahead and do it instead of putting it on a list.

 

However, remember that you don't need to fill out every field of every form. You can put in as much or as little as you wish, and ResultsManager will cope. The information entered about Activities is designed to help you review and access them later, when you need to. So if you are never going to review your activities by Area, then you don't need to put anything in the Area box when creating an Activity.

 

ResultsManager also helps a lot by automatically inheriting information that is not defined. So the simplest way to create action items is to write the defaults just once in the Central Topic of a map, e.g. "Office" for the Context, and your name for the Owner. Then anything in the map that does not have a different context or owner will default to the ones in the Central Topic. So you can add Activities and only enter the name of the Activity, and they will appear in your Dashboards.

 

Click the ResultsManager tab | Options group | User Mode to switch between Express and Power User modes. When you change modes, ResultsManager automatically displays the Options for that mode.

 

You can use Hyperlinks on Activity Topics in your project maps, but these Hyperlinks do not appear in the Dashboard copies of these Topics. The Topic Hyperlinks in Dashboard maps are reserved for linking to the original Project map, so that you can quickly return to the right place in the middle of a project map from the Dashboard. If you edit the Hyperlinks in the Dashboard map, ResultsManager may attempt to update the wrong Topic if you press F5 (MindManager Pro only) or use the Send Dashboard Changes command.

 

ResultsManager uses the Topic Notes feature in MindManager to store the Purpose for Actions, Projects and Results.

 

The first thing to check is whether you have disabled the option to include Topic Notes in Dashboard maps. If you have, and if you are editing a Dashboard map, then the Purpose text box is greyed out since the original Topic Notes are not available in the Dashboard map. To edit the Topic Notes, click on the hyperlink in the Dashboard map and edit them in the original Project map.

 

If this does not apply, then the other possibility is that ResultsManager cannot edit the current Notes. Topic Notes in MindManager can contain rich text features like bullet points, bold text, colours, Hyperlinks and so on. However, the ResultsManager edit dialogue will only support plain text in the current version. To avoid accidental loss of important information from the Notes (e.g. Hyperlinks), ResultsManager will only permit this text to be edited if it is plain text, and does not contain any rich text features. So if the Edit dialogue looks like this:

 

Editing of Notes blocked because they contain rich text

 

.. then this is because the Notes for this Topic contain features that ResultsManager cannot edit. You can edit these Notes using regular Topic Notes pane in MindManager - see the MindManager Essentials section.

 

Tip: sometimes MindManager thinks that Notes are Rich Text even when you haven't used any features such as bullets or Hyperlinks. The workaround is to open the Notes window, click in it, and press Ctrl+A to select all the text. Then press Ctrl+Space to clear the style formats. Make sure you do this in your original project maps, and not the Dashboard maps, otherwise it will only reappear again. This usually clears any problem with editing text in the ResultsManager window.

 

If you get the error message "Dashboard editing is not enabled" when trying to edit Topics in a Dashboard map, there are two causes:

• You are using ResultsManager Standard Edition. Editing from Dashboard maps is only supported in the Professional Edition. Check which edition you are using with the ResultsManager tab | Product group | About ResultsManager.
• You are using the Professional Edition, but Dashboard editing is not enabled in the Options. Click on  the ResultsManager tab | Options group | Options | ResultsManager Options, activate dashboard editing, then click OK.

 

Currently there is no automated support for recurring activities (e.g. something that happens on the same day every week or month). However, it is easy to keep track of recurring activities; as you complete them, simply move their start or due date back by a week or a month, and leave their status as incomplete. For example, you could add weekly and monthly reviews as regular activities.

 

Currently, MindManager does not allow minutes or fractions of an hour to be used in the Duration field. You can use a Context to label activities that will only take a few minutes - see Tips and Tricks.

 

Currently there is no utility that will search all your maps and make a change to an Owner name, a Context, a Category or an Area. This is under consideration for a future version. If you need to change an existing name, then the easiest way to do this is to run create the Maintenance Dashboard, select all the activities that use the field to be changed, and edit them in the Maintenance Dashboard. The block edit feature  in Power User mode will help with this. Then send the changes back from the Maintenance Dashboard to the original project maps. This is quicker than searching the individual project maps, or waiting for the name to appear in the regular dashboard maps.

 

(MindManager Pro only) When the "Activity" Smart Map Part is deployed in a map, the Edit dialogue should automatically open. However, if you install a MindManager Service Pack, you may find that the Smart Map Part stops working. This is a known issue. The workaround is to re-install ResultsManager so that it re-registers its Smart Map Part with MindManager again.

 

Under certain conditions, the choices available in the "Progress made" selector in the Activity Edit dialogue can disappear:

 

No choices in the "Progress made" selection

 

The cause of this is the lack of Map Markers in the "Task Complete (%)" group. The possible causes are

 

• The markers could have been deleted manually (which would be unusual), or
• It might be the result of applying a Map Marker set which does not contain these markers, or
• It is a known side-effect of creating new maps in MindManager X5 by breaking them off another map with the File | Send To | MindManager (as new Map) command. Some versions of MindManager lose the Map Markers of the parent map, or
• It may also happen if a MindManager 2002 map is opened with MindManager X5.

 

The solution in all cases is to re-instate the Map Markers that represent percent complete for tasks, either by hand in the Map Markers task pane, or by applying another Map Marker scheme from the Template Organizer. Refer to the MindManager documentation for further information.

 

Typically, users want to keep the information about completed activities in case it is needed again, but they do not want it filling up their maps. Some solutions to this are:

 

• Archive a dated copy of the map from time to time, and delete completed items in the current version.
• Use the Map Marker filters to hide completed activities in the map. To do this:
• Set Filtering so that selected topics are hidden
• Check the "Task Complete" marker in the Map Markers task pane
• Click the Filter/Select button and select all completed tasks
• Click the Filter button to hide all completed tasks and their subtopics.

 

Refer to the MindManager documentation for more information.

 

The fundamental rule is that a project cannot span more than one map, because you can't draw relationships (dependencies) to a task in a different map. For practical reasons, when sharing maps with others, it is often better to keep to one project in a map, so you can just share or send a single project.

 

If ResultsManager does not find a "project" topic when it looks upwards from task topics (towards the central topic), it will assume that the central topic defines the project. If you want it to appear explicitly in the list of projects in dashboards, then it must also be a task (with a percent-complete icon on it). If you don't want it to be listed as a proper project, don't put a task icon on it.

 

ResultsManager will not consider the central topic to be a project unless you have other action items in the map that are not under an  explicit Project.

 

You can have multiple projects in a single map by assigning the Project icon to any topic. You can even have projects "within" projects. ResultsManager will recognise them as projects if they have a percent-complete icon and the ResultsManager project icon on them.