Part 1 of 2: Apps to Capture, Organize, Schedule, and Communicate Information.

I felt that our 2009 articles would not be complete without a review of the application and tools that we use here at Think Around Corners. We’ve been in business for over 12 years, now, and during that time have probably used every online and offline tool at least once that you might be familiar with.

Most of the tools described below are completely FREE.

Tool								$/mo.	Notes
Mindjet MindManager								0	FREE alternative: MindMeister
Evernote								0	Capture video, text, audio
Basecamp								24	Manage BIG lists, threading
Google Calendar								0	Mult. calendars, sharing, print
Google Gmail								0	Labeling, Filtering, pool accts.
Less Accounting								24	Review funds anywhere
Microsoft Excel								0	FREE Alternative: Google Docs
EditPad								0	Powerful find/replace
Mozilla Firefox								0	See goodies below
TOTAL								49	Total for Year: $588

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Mindjet MindManager

Of the 9 tools, Mindjet MindManager is one of my favorite discoveries. Although I had used it a time or two years ago, I didn’t really get why it was so useful.

Now, I cannot live without it. It is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful tools I have ever used.

Why? Well, my problem has never been getting ideas, but developing and organizing ideas, shaping them, making them come to life for use in my business.

This is especially important in writing arguments and articles like this one.

The ultimate ‘thought organization’. Sometimes you just gotta blast out ideas. You know, brainstorm. And MindManager allows you to do just that.

It even has a ‘brainstorm mode’ right in the program. Nifty, huh?

Take a look at the images to the right. The first one is the mind map in its ‘collapsed’ form. The second is with one of the branches completely expanded. What is really wonderful is your ability in MindManager to expand and contract at will, allowing you to zoom in on fine details (the ‘leaves’), and zoom out to get the big picture (the ‘trunk’). That means, you have have almost infinite detail about a project, concept, or idea, without getting lost in the blitz of information pouring out of your head.

The ultimate ‘fleshing out’ tool. After you have all your ideas out on the screen, you can then organize them in any way you like. Drag and drop whole branches to reorganize the structure of things.

Capture ideas, too. Sometimes I simply keep MindManager open all day long, and capture ideas as I work through the day. I do a lot of parallel processing, and when I get stuck on a process, I switch over to another and keep working. Note the “Floating Articles branch in the bottom right of the second image.

I use MindManager to do almost any business task:

• Plan an important meeting,
• Build the content for a website,
• SWOT analysis,
• Business plans for clients,
• Creating an entire battleplan for 2010,
• Everything.

It’s a bit expensive. Yes, MindManager is a tool that costs $399. I believe it to be worth every penny. However, if you want to play with a mind-mapping tool before you buy the Mindjet’s full program, try MindMeister. It’s a bit clunky and not as feature-rich, but it will give you a chance to play with this powerful type of tool. Heck, you might even find it enough for you, and it’s interface is completely online, so there is no need to download anything. It’s growing in popularity, and adding features regularly.

Evernote

Evernote is a cute little program that I have only recently started to use. It’s a great capturing program. It’s also free.

Capture anything. One of the things that I love about Evernote is that it captures many types of information; audio, video, text, web pages, probably even more (as I have not explored all the facets of the program yet.) It’s iPhone capable, probably other mobile devices too (like Blackberry).

Compile it together. Do you remember that old program by Microsoft that allowed you to put end to end many types of Microsoft files, called Microsoft Binder? Excel charts, Powerpoint slides, etc. It’s kinda like that. It allows you to bring a ton of disparate information together all in one place.

Organize and filter. You can tag the snippets, too. That means you can filter the material easily, and not get lost in the mass of snippets that you can generate over even an afternoon.

Share information across computers and devices. To be able to share information through a browser and mobile device, is a godsend. Often, I’ll have an idea, and I just audio record it, then send to my email box (if it’s really important). That way, it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of a workday.

Share ideas with others. But you don’t have to stop there. You can share folders with others, and they can contribute, too. This collaboration is perfect for small teams.

Interesting uses. You could use it to plan an entire trip in sequence with this tool. Compile a list of household items and take pictures of them. Wine lists, for instance. You could also snap pics of business cards and save them to Google Contacts, if you like. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple visual trigger to get the brain going.

I am sure that as I use Evernote more I’ll find more uses for it. The greatest aspect of Evernote is that you can pull different types of media, together, then filter through tagging. As we all know, capturing information is critical in not losing your ideas. Filter them is the way to make sure you can use them again.

Basecamp by 37 Signals.

When I started up my business again on the east coast, I decided to organize my projects and clients better. I needed a tool to accomplish 5 basic things:

1. Plan a project, start to finish, step-by-step
2. Track a project’s progress through time much better
3. Keep on track with multiple projects without getting lost in the middle on small details
4. Collaborate with clients on individual steps within a project, without confusing the client,
5. Duplicate efforts as easily as possible for the next project (and client).

And Basecamp does this in spades.

Capture ideas into a overall structure. Each project is broken down into To-do lists, each to-do list broken down into steps (line items).

Capture loose ideas, until you’re ready for them. I now use MindManager more for idea capturing, but Basecamp is still a great tool for this. I have a HOLD to-do list, right at the top of each project, to just enter stuff that I can’t spend more time on (like when I am taking notes from a client while on the phone).

Schedule biz development. All to-do lists and line items can be marked with a due date. That means you can track progress of each project, to-do list, or line item, over time.

Assign line items to various people: Each line item can be assigned to a particular person.

Filter your view, on the fly. Since Basecamp is a repository of all tasks that you need to perform, it tends to fill up! But you can filter your views, and cut to what’s important, very quickly. Here’s a quick video (it’s all the way at the bottom of that page) about filtering that will help you understand this function.

Thread ideas and conversations into workflow. Let’s say I have a line item, called Establish Local Business Center for client, under a to-do list called Website Revamp I. Maybe I have a question about what phone number or address to use for your company. For that line item, I can send an email directly from Basecamp to you. If you respond, right from within your email, two things will happen; one, I will be alerted via email, and two your response will be recorded in Basecamp. This can happen again and again, back and forth ‘threading’ the responses on that line item.

Now, let’s say months go by and I have a question about what was done in the past. I could call you again and ask you, or I could go in and see the response you wrote. If you had previously attached a file to the email conversation, it’s uploaded into Basecamp automatically, and I can view it anytime in the future.

Of course, Basecamp has a powerful searching function, and a plethora of other functionality I won’t go into here. But if you want to collaborate better with employees, partners, or clients and customers, this is the tool to do it.

It’s a monthly cost, but worth it. Yes, it costs money ($24/month for the lowest paid version) but you’ll never notice the expense. Plus, you can do the first month free. Try it, you’ll see the value of it immediately!

Here is a great link for videos of Basecamp in action.

Google Calendar

I’ve been on the fence with electronic calendars since they were invented. You put too much in, you can’t see the trees for the forest. You could not easily carry it with you, though admittedly now you can access most calendars through mobile devices, like the iPhone.

However, there are some great advantages. Need to plan something 3 months out? A small pen-and-paper calendar in the back of your pocket doesn’t do that easily. What about recurring events? You only need to create them one-time. And those lovely beep reminders have saved my bacon more than once (doesn’t missing a phone conversation give you that icky feeling?). So, why Google Calendar instead of something else?

It’s free. Like all Google Apps, it’s completely free. And it integrates with Gmail pretty well.

It’s web accessible. Instead of having to load a program, it’s right in your browser, whatever you use. That means it’s accessible from any computer with Internet connectivity. Yay!

Flexible reminder rules. And, you can set as many reminders as you like for each calendar item. That means if you have a calendar marked “Critical”, you can set multiple reminders, whether by email or popup. If you have your Google Calendar integrated with your mobile device, it will beep you on your phone.

Multiple calendars. Google Calendar has the ability for multiple calendars, as well as ‘sharing’ those calendars with others, as well as ‘attendance’ functionality. Of course, you can color code your calendars. You can also turn on and off calendars to get a filtered view, quickly.

RSS integration. I use Basecamp for my ‘wide aperture’ view of project milestones, and since Basecamp supports RSS feeding, I can ‘pull in’ my Basecamp into my Google Calendar. This is especially important when I time block my week (see below).

Time-blocking. Ever get to the end of the week and say, “Where did all my time go?” Google Calendar is great for this time-blocking time. And, if you’re using Basecamp like me, I can quickly see what big plans I have to accomplish for the week (i.e. Phase II Client 3 due this Friday.)

Sharing calendars. If you would like to share a calendar, it’s easy. Just put the email of the calendar recipient into the settings, they accept the calendar, and voila! In like Flint. Of course, the caveat here is that they also must use Google Calendar, and that means your shared group all must have a Google Account.

Take it with you. As stated before, you can get GCal on your mobile device. If I have a free moment while waiting in line for something, I’ll flip it open, check the calendar; perhaps there is a phone call that I can make. You can also enter calendar items into your mobile device, which is handy for capturing.

In summary, Google Calendar is much like dozens of calendars out there, but it seems to be the one that works for me. It’s free, it’s web accessible from anywhere, it integrates well with Basecamp, Gmail, and RSS, and it notifies me of impending doom. What more do you want?

Google Gmail

You might already use it. But in the scheme of free email, any email program, Gmail is the best we’ve come across.

Multiple email accounts in one place. You can pool your accounts from everywhere into one ‘box’. You probably don’t have 23 (yes, 23) emails like me, but hey, it’s useful even if you have two emails (one for personal, one for business, for instance). Plus, you can send emails back from Gmail appropriately (business responses will be from business email address, personal from personal, etc.)

Powerful filtering. Gmail is powerful in the ways of the filtering. Filtering allows you to ‘set rules’ for incoming mail, based on criteria. For instance, you can set all incoming business mail, based upon email address (i.e. yourname@yourbiz.com) to redirect to a particular folder. Or, you can say that any email that ends with facebook.com to be labeled Networking.

Very useful labeling and ‘rules’. Labeling is powerful, and lets you color code and label incoming mail. That’s really important when you get over 100 pieces per day that are not spam.

Spamination.It’s the best spam filter we’ve ever seen. Period.

Google Contacts. It just seems to be getting more and more powerful; Gmail has Contacts built in, and you can tag each contact with multiple labels (Mentor, Peer, POTENTIAL, Friends, Family, etc.) Also shareable on your mobile device, don’t you know.

Add-ons we use. There are a ton of add-ons in Gmail, that extend your Gmail experience. Here are the ones we use.

• Mouse Gestures - right-click and drag left to see previous conversation, etc.
• Canned Responses - if you find yourself responding in similar ways again and again, use this to create ‘templates’ for responses. We use it for giving directions to our home, sending people happy birthday text, and various signatures
• Custom Label Colors - now you can choose the colors you want for labels.
• Multiple Inboxes – I have my Action-labeled items at the top of my Inbox, which keeps me on track for the tasks at hand.
• Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat - Gmail has a chat function built it, but with this tool I can send someone a text message, too. Great for when Lisa is coming home from work and I need to send her a grocery list.
• Keyboard Shortcuts – It’s under the general settings tab, not Google Labs, just so you know. But it’s immensely powerful. Hit ‘g’ then ‘i’ anywhere in Gmail, and it will take you back to the Inbox. Hit ‘g’ then ‘c’ and it will take you to your Google Contacts.
• Go to Label - Used in conjunction with Keyboard Shortcuts, this allows me to go to any label that I have created.

There is a slight learning curve to Gmail, as there are no more ‘folders’ anymore, which is very unlike other programs you might have used. But it’s not really important. Why? Because Labels allow you to label one email with many labels, instead of just one folder. Let’s face it, sometimes a piece of email should be labeled with Critical and Mom at the same time.

Next week: apps 6-9

Well, we’ve gone through the apps to Capture, Organize, Schedule, and Communicate information. But this is just apps 1-5 of 9, total. Next week, we’ll go through tools that Calculate, Edit, and Browse information, namely Less Accounting, Microsoft Excel, EditPad, and Mozilla Firefox.

Your Call to Action:

Hope you’ve enjoyed this article! What tools and apps do YOU use? We would love to know what you find lifesavers in the Biz Apps arena! Please comment below.