Category Archives: Personal Productivity

See also: PIM, Cognitive Styles, Visualization

Seven habits of…

Posted on June 14, 2017 by

Seven habits make my workflow satisfying. In particular: pull over push, optimized for browse rather than search, and careless capturing but cultivating later. Continue reading →

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Tangible Associations

Posted on June 1, 2016 by

I understand now better how the “magic” of my tool works: it makes associations tangible. It turns elusive mental relationships into “hands on” experience, and it compensates for the abstractness of some thought links, with a drawn line “at our fingertips”.
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Im-/Export from/to other think tools

Posted on May 26, 2016 by

Comparing two other think tools with my own tool one can say that they are rather suited as the big long-term storage “cupboard” while my own tool is more like the “table” where things are put for a temporary large overview.
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Physical overhead of Mindmapping

Posted on March 4, 2016 by

While I have often argued for Cmapping and against simple hierarchical mindmapping, there are benefits that mitigate the inherent problem of such
nested hierarchies, They may help capturing the structure of a talk while listening.
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Good and bad news from Cmap

Posted on December 20, 2014 by

Good news from Cmap: there are now ways to avoid two stubborn behaviors of the application: No more forced proposition texts, and arrow-heads even if arrows slope downwards. But the bad news is that doubleclicking on my cmaps doesn’t work any more, so I have to roll back to the old version.
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Think Tools

Posted on July 24, 2014 by

in a little symposium called “Denkwerkzeug” (= Think Tool), in a charming location right below Frankenstein castle, it became very clear that good tools are still missing. Meantime, there is the occasion of listing my own top 10 tools.
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Between Empowerment and Patronization: 40 Years IT

Posted on June 21, 2013 by

My first contact with IT was 40 years ago. Spectacular speeds and sizes of storage and transportation of formerly analog carriers, never impressed me. For me, really new empowerment came through rearranging, and sorting and quick grouping. And many of the great novelties ignited hopes that were bigger than the reality emerging later.
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Why I like my tool

Posted on May 20, 2013 by

It’s still beta and it’s not beautiful. It’s very difficult to explain why I am so enthusiastic about my tool. The rationalization of its surprising power is roughly, that it minimizes the distance between two operating modes, and minimizes abstraction.
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Think Know Tools

Posted on November 28, 2012 by

In the last six weeks I participated in a wonderful course offered by Howard Rheingold: “Think Know Tools”. It was very open in the sense of open minds. And in particular, the diversity component was at least as strong as in (c-)MOOCs.
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Auto arrange vs. visual thinking

Posted on May 22, 2010 by

Windows 7 repeatedly jumbled my desktop icons. The desktop was the last folder where I could arrange my icons freely, while in all other folders, Snap to Grid is now mandatory. Why do they prohibit me from using my folder windows at least a little bit like a mindmapping tool by rearranging and clustering the icons in a spatially meaningful way?
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