I’ve been using the excellent “Clear Context” plugin for Outlook to help me organize my incoming mail stream into tasks in Outlook. I like the way you can almost instantly turn mail into a task. I also use ActiveWords to copy the body of a mail message into a task if I want to do more custom editing of a task. (ActiveWords also lets me change the SMTP server in Outlook on my laptop from my work SMTP to my home ISP and back when I get to my desk). Both are helping me get more organized
Another cool tool in the arsenal is MindManager Pro 6. I know I can export tasks to MM and have it make a mind Map. What I’d really like to do, though, is find the way to the category property of each task I export to MM, and sort or group the task by their categories in MM.
Since I keep tasks in the @-next-action, @ project, and @ waiting for categories (there are others, but these are what I care about) I want to sort/keep them together by category in the Mind Map. I’d also ultimately like to draw links from the projects to the next actions for each project, so I might be able to visually see when a project doesn’t have a specific next action.
This KB article http://www.mindjet.com/us/forum/viewtopic.php?t=431 seems to start to address the issue:
Once you add categories to tasks in MS Outlook and sync these tasks with MindManager (File -> Import -> Microsoft Outlook Tasks) all categories from Outlook will be converted to text markers group called “Categories.”
I’ve now Imported my tasks, and they are grouped as I want. Now the interesting part – can I link the “Next Items” and “Waiting For” items to the Projects with which they are associated. Stay tuned. Your comments welcome.