Some of my favourite tools

A while back in my 'How to learn from failure post' I wrote about monitoring results. That post assumed to much fore knowledge with my readers about Admin Scales and so on. Admin Scales are essential to me, I have considered writing a post about them but the subject is 1) off-topic and 2) often alienates people, which is not my intention.

Planning, execution of plans and recording efforts and results come before the implementation of a system based on statistics ( and ethics ). As an individual you want the benefits of planning and control but not the costs. Investing too much time in planning makes it inefficient in no-time. Most people work with some form of a todo list. Often in digital form managed by an iPhone app or similar. Todo lists and so forth only work under certain conditions as brilliantly discovered by David Allen, the inventor of GTD. Since 'GTD', most personal planning systems are adaptions of his method. Allen's company sells an Outlook add-on as an example of a good technical implementation of GTD. They also support Personal Brain for example.

Admin Scales have a BE, DO and HAVE dimension. For the DO dimension I use MindManager ( have been using it for brainstorming for more than 10 years ) in combination with MyLife Organized ( MLO ). MLO imports MindManager mindmaps, has a desktop version and App versions for iPhone, Blackberry, PocketPC and Android(soon). MLO is NOT a normal todo list program. Once you get adjusted to it, it acts like someone who thinks with you and knows which item of your huge ( hierarchical ) todo list you should do first. It has an outliner view and a do-now view. It is a phenomenal piece of software but it takes time to appreciate all the features.