New Blog Address

The PersonalBrain101 blog has moved!

Please come visit us in our new home at:

blog.thebrain.com

See you there!
Matt

Spring Cleaning: 6 Ways You Can Improve Your Brain

“One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song? Did you guess which thing was not like the others? Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong? If you guessed this one is not like the others, Then you're absolutely...right!”

-Words and Music by Joe Raposo and Jon Stone

Editing and Overhauling your Brain? Well, start singing! Okay if you haven’t sung this song at least once in your life, watched Sesame Street or maybe played this game with your kids then you are probably finding this a rather odd start to a blog post on editing a Brain. But if you attended my Webinar last month then you will probably realize that this is the perfect tune for the task of cleaning your Brain. And will lead us into Tip #1 for editing your Brain…

1. Creating Subcategories and Information Groups
There are many reasons why it might be time to breathe some new life into your old and faithful Brain but one of the most common that I’ve bumped into is too many Thoughts linked under one parent or general category. Now how does this happen? Isn’t that the point of PersonalBrain? Let me explain.

There is a wonderful freedom and ease of use that we all experience when first creating our Brain or adding a section. Weee!! Just drag and drop and in that file goes! Yippy, drag from my active Thought and add one more idea, now captured and forever incarnated in my digital Brain. It’s just plain fun. This process of adding information in and creating new Thoughts and linking them together is absolutely critical for building and taking advantage of your digital Brain. However, you might have a few areas where you have too many Thoughts grouped together.

You can tidy this up quite nicely with some additional subcategories for these Thoughts. Now this is where you get to sing the Sesame Street Song! The task here is to look for commonalities and natural sub-groupings of Thoughts. For instance, if you are a consultant and have hundreds of clients rather then listing all one hundred clients under your “Client” Thought you might want to divide these clients up by industry, service, or territory… Or maybe all three. Remember that your Brain isn’t a linear file system so putting something under multiple categories is no problem.


Before

This can get messy. So look for similarities between large groups of Thoughts to further organize.

After

Creating some intervening Thoughts that help classify and organize other thoughts can help you understand your subject matter further.

I have also seen large amounts of “top level” Thoughts in users’ “Personal” sections. I think this is because your Personal area can become a nice and convenient holding ground for everything that isn’t part of your business projects. (And BTW, that’s a good thing because this means that you’re capturing cool web sites and amazing ideas instead of forgetting about them or losing them on the Web or your hard drive somewhere). So here again if you have too many Thoughts under your “Personal” section you need to create some subcategories to move these Thoughts under. Look for ways to group or “infochunk” these items. Some suggestions might be distinguishing information that is a hobby, family, house issue, personal finance, beauty or health. These additional categories also help you learn about yourself and create “knowledge hubs” for key interests and projects in your life.


2. Identifying Key Areas and Creating Knowledge Hubs
When managing a large Brain its helpful to identify and be aware of key areas that are major headings or what we call in Brain speak “parents” that link to information we access the most. You probably are doing this inadvertently through Pins. Pins are located at the top of your Brain’s display for easy access. You can think of them as bookmarks to Thoughts you use frequently that are “pinned” in place. (Create a pin by right clicking on a Thought the Create Pin command.)

A good way to identify these knowledge hubs is to look at your Pins. Identifying key knowledge hubs in your Brain will serve to orient you to various sections. Once you have identified your key knowledge hubs you might consider connecting them all right under your home Thought, which a lot of the time is the name of your Brain. For instance under Shelley (my home Thought), I have Business and Personal as key paths in my Brain. My key knowledge hubs under Business are Product Development, Marketing, Sales, and so forth… Once you have identified your key knowledge hubs make sure you have pins for your main ones and now you can begin review the structure under each hub and the Thoughts that are connected there.

3. Using the “Gardening Approach”
Jerry Michalski’s Brain is over 75,000 Thoughts. When asked in one of our seminars about how he edits his Brain he talked a lot about his “Gardening” approach. It is very simple and therein lies its brilliance. When he is in a particular section of his Brain if something is out of place, he fixes it. This method is worth pointing out because what I’ve been suggesting so far is somewhat analytic and based on more of a macro perspective of your Brain. This is a more Zen-like approach that hones in on the details which is equally effective. Gardening is a little more focused on a particular area that you’re currently in for whatever reason. This principle centers on the active Thought and just being mindful of what you have connected to it. This process is very complementary and necessary to your knowledge hubs and macro perspective of your overall Brain structure. Both are necessary. Sound easy? It is! Now you can start pruning (unlinking things that don’t make sense anymore or connections that aren’t useful) and planting some seeds (adding new and useful Thoughts to build from…)

4. Creating Associative Connections and Interlocking Hierarchies of Information
This is the B side of Tip #1. This may not apply to everyone, but some people can definitely use this…There is a type of Brain user that simply can’t move beyond hierarchies. You have a Brain of subcategory to subcategory, child after child, and sometimes the document that you use all the time is buried very deep in a very stratified Thought structure. Now of course you can get to any Thought in a matter of a second with “instant activate”, one of PersonalBrain’s most powerful features. Regardless, the structure of your Brain should serve your Thought process and drive discovery in a way that information hierarchies can’t.

This is the classic issue of breath versus depth. One of the reasons PersonalBrain is so different from conventional mind mapping software is because of its ability to move beyond sub branching of information. In other words, something at the bottom of one category/Thought structure can easily be a parent or link to an idea somewhere else. You can have your cake and eat it too! Don’t forget this! So, if you have a document that is organized as a great, great, great grandchild within a Thought structure, remember it can always be connected at a higher level somewhere else.

For example, I have wonderfully deep thought structure for my client proposals, however the one that I’m focusing on currently I link right under my “Sales” Thought. This way it is ever present and easy to get to when I’m in the sales area. Now, when I’m done working on this proposal Jerry’s concept of “Gardening” comes into play and I unlink that proposal from sales so it resides where it resides. Isn’t life in your Brain grand? Once you start creating the right number of Thought categories you’ll find it very easy to move beyond a single hierarchy because it’s very rare that an idea or document will only fit exclusively under one concept.

Connecting people to projects, their peers or expertise is another example or idea which can help you evolve your Brain beyond basic hierarchies. For instance, you might have a people map of your corporate directory in your Brain. People reporting to other people displayed as parent-child links. (This is very useful when working with large teams.) But each person might be an expert in a different research field or run a certain department. While still having that person nested within its reporting structure you can make a lateral (or in Brain lingo, “jump”) connection to their expertise. So your hierarchy of services or departments interlocks with your hierarchy of people. This can be very powerful for illuminating on complex data sets.




When viewing sales information I have a lateral connection to a key executive in charge of that division.




Clicking on that person displays their relevant position in the corporate hierarchy. This is one example of an interlocking hierarchy between people and departments.

5. Naming Conventions and Getting Specific with your Thoughts
One of the neatest little improvements TheBrain engineering team made to PersonalBrain 4.1’s instant search is the ability to identify Thoughts with the same name by showing what else they were connected to…However this does beg the question, what are you doing with redundant Thought names?

Hmmm…Your Brain in some sense is really no different from your computer file system in this respect. Naming two files or Thoughts the same thing can be done in both. This is sometimes convenient, but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead to problems. Try and be as specific as you can with your Thought names. In the long run this will pay dividends. If you are finding Thoughts with the same name, use a different name. (And the great thing about personal Brain is as soon as you start typing a new Thought it shows you a list of Thoughts with the same name.)

But hold on… Don’t just create another name for the sake of making it different - try something that is more specific. For instance I’m working on a newsletter for March, so I start to create a Thought called “March Newsletter” and lo and behold what does PersonalBrain show? A Thought that already exists called “March Newsletter”. This helps me realize that I should actually call this Thought March 2008 Newsletter and that I should start organizing certain projects by year and quarter in addition to project type. As your Brain ages, organizing by year can be very helpful for historical reference. And again because we aren’t working with your typical mind mapping software, just because you are organizing by year doesn’t mean that this has to be the only way. With PersonalBrain you can have one piece of information effectively located under multiple Thoughts.

Finally if you do need to use the same Thought name more than once, you can use context-sensitive names. PersonalBrain offers a timesaver (affectionately known as the “comma trick”) for helping you manage Thoughts that should appear to have the same name, and are children of separate Thoughts. Here’s an example of when this might occur: Say you have Thoughts for each of your clients, each of which has a billing department. You’d like a child Thought named “Billing Info” for each of your client Thoughts. However, you may not want to have duplicate Thought names. Why? Because later, when you’re looking at these Thoughts you won’t be able to tell them apart without looking at their parents.

Here’s how to remedy this potential dilemma when you create the new Thought: When you type the Thought name, first type the name of its parent, then type a comma, then type the name of the new Thought.

The Thought will display its full name when it is active. When its parent Thought is active, you’ll see only the portion of the name that does not repeat the parent’s name. Ensuring that each of your Thoughts has a unique name will help find and identify them more easily.

The part of the Thought’s name that is hidden is context sensitive. Say for example that you wanted to have a single place to see the billing information for all your clients. You might create a thought called “Billing Info” and then link to the billing information Thoughts for each of your clients, such as “NewGuys, Billing Info.” If you do this, when Billing Info is active then NewGuys, Billing Info will appear as just NewGuys, whereas when NewGuys is active, that same Thought will appear as Billing Info. Try it―you’ll see how this can be very useful.


6. Customizing your Brain with Thought Icons, Types and Wallpaper
Customizing your Thought colors and background can result in some major improvements to your Brain. PersonalBrain has a number of cool customization options that can really make your Brain look spectacular! With version 4 there are zoomable icons that can really add some wow factor to your Thoughts. You can drag and drop pictures into your Brain to get the thumbnails or copy an image from the web and then right click on your Thought and select Paste Thought Icon. This sets the image as the icon for your Thought. All link colors, Thought text and backgrounds can be customized through the Preferences dialog. Also, remember there are some preset themes built-in in the Options Menu that will enable you quickly try out color settings and themes so you can test which ones are most complimentary to your work habits and content.

I’ve been talking about subcategorizing large information groups as a means of further organization. But there’s also another way to do this, especially if you don’t like seeing a lot of child Thoughts under others, and that is to distinguish large volumes of information with Thought Types. Thought Types represent an additional level of classification on your Thoughts. You can give Thought types their own color, mouse-over labels and icons. If you have a number of child Thoughts PersonalBrain will automatically group all your Thought Types together so you can easily identify key types of information. You can also set Link Types and adjust the thickness of your links to convey the strength of certain relationships. The possibilities are endless.

Let the Spring Cleaning Begin!
With a little gardening and or analytics of a Sesame Street Song your Brain can be completely transformed. A little linking and unlinking can go a long way. To learn more on the how-tos of moving Thoughts around and modifying your Brain structure watch my PersonalBrain 202 class on editing your Brain.

TheBrain is Number 1 on Apple.com!

PersonalBrain is now ranked number one on the list of Most Popular Productivity Tools on http://www.apple.com/.



Thanks MacBrain users :)

Matt

Webinar Recordings

The return of the webinars!!!

Many of you have been missing our old webinar recordings on line. We recently switched back to GoToMeeting (from Webex) for our special webinars an Friday PB101 classes. This means the old Webex hosted recording had to be exported to Flash and moved. Well, they're back. So if you are interested in seeing...

• PersonalBrain on Mac
• Jerry's 84,000+ Thought Brain
• Inside the Mind of an Inventor
• Learning how to publish a SiteBrain
• Shelley's EKP demo
• and many more...

look no further than:

www.thebrain.com/#-130

Enjoy the show :)

Matt

Interview with Harlan Hugh

Your Computer Desktop Rethought.

After Harlan Hugh's full session of attendees at VizThink 2008 we thought we'd provide you with some key ideas and concepts covered in the session as answered by Harlan Hugh.

What was the original inspiration for TheBrain?

When I first started working with computers in 1980 all there was to do for a kid was to learn to program. Games weren’t very exciting and I had no interest in spreadsheets or word processors. But programming was a way for me to take the ideas in my head and make them come to life. As I grew up, I found that most people didn’t see the computer that way – they just saw it as a typewriter with a screen on it, or at best a digital version of a filing cabinet.

Since I thought of the computer as much more – really the first tool that is purely information oriented, this perception was quite frustrating. I wanted everyone to be excited about using their computer. To me it was obvious that the desktop metaphor was at the core of the problem. By telling people that the computer is just like a desk, with folders and files, you limit their perception of the possibilities. Not to mention that the desktop for the most part actually does impose many restrictions on how we organize information that are merely hold-overs from the real-world metaphor it is based on.

With this realization, the next thing to do was to change the metaphor from the desktop, a symbol of the industrial age, to the human brain, a symbol of the information age. What better way to think of organizing information on your computer than the most powerful information processor ever created?

The metaphor of the human brain provided most of the fundamental inspiration from there – thoughts and their associations, the ability to work with many thoughts and switch between them instantly, each thought triggering related thoughts, and so on. Of course, the visualization of these concepts was also another key aspect of the creation of TheBrain software.

What are some problems with current methods of organizing information?

Current methods of organizing information are typically very linear or application centric: organizing your bookmarks in your browser, your documents in your My Documents folder. For basic tasks on your computer this might be fine but if you are working on a project that requires you to reference multiple sources or assimilate a variety of information you will lose your train of thought or miss important information. There also tends to be an over-reliance on search as a method of file management which can get users and companies into a lot of trouble. It’s great that we have powerful ways of searching for files and Web sites but you still need a system of organization for the information that you are storing. If you don’t your computer becomes a mess with redundant files and copies, no navigation system and a very stressful environment to work in. In other words, search is great if you know exactly what you are looking for but it’s difficult to discover related information and impossible to understand data relationships with search lists. It certainly is not a system of organizing information. Our own brains need more…

How does TheBrain solution address these problems?

We design software that is very idea or topic centric. The type of file or application you are working with or within should be incidental to understanding and accessing your information. This premise is reflected in the very core of our user interface design. Your Active Thought is at the center of your screen and all related items surround that topic. You can link files, Web pages, ideas; there are no limits to the number of connections you can make in your Brain. This offers the user a freedom of expression that is not possible within a folder structure yet still provides a structure and a system of organization that is reliable yet organic. By representing all information uniformly as Thoughts you can transcend the boundaries of your file types and applications, working in a world of concepts and ideas. It’s a mental space that lets you access relevant data as it’s needed. This is why showing someone your Brain can be very personal.


How has that vision changed with Web 2.0 trends?

The expanding Web communities and new Internet technologies have led to some very exciting developments for TheBrain that we continue to develop upon. With BrainEKP thousands of users can author and share Thoughts and links within a single Brain all through a browser. You can even setup different levels of access control and customize views for user communities. With PersonalBrain our HTML export is now in a lightweight Web component with the ability to quickly run on all browsers.

How many Thoughts are in your Brain and what do you use your Brain for?

My brain has about 12,000 thoughts. I track everything and everybody that is important to my life. Every project that I work on, people that I meet, resources I use – it’s all in my Brain. The key Thoughts in my Brain are: Personal – where I have information on my house, finances, healthcare, family, hobbies, and other stuff, TheBrain – where I track everything related to TheBrain Technologies (the company), and World – where I put everything else, such as people I meet, the companies they work for, products I am interested in, trends I am watching, etcetera.

I access my Brain constantly throughout the day – looking up people, opening Web sites, jotting down notes, writing proposals, etcetera. Everything one does to run a business. I also use my Brain a lot to track engineering projects that I am running. For this, I have feature lists, completed tasks, related technologies, key issues, and resources I might like to use (such as online articles and 3rd party products or open source projects).

What’s in store for PersonalBrain customers in 2008?

We have many exciting developments in the works right now. This year we have expanded our user community for PersonalBrain considerably, welcoming Mac and Linux users in addition to our PC user base. Our commitment to delivering to end users’ feature requests and innovation is paramount. You can get a sneak preview of what’s next via our beta program, which you can participate in by downloading the latest beta from the bottom of our download page. This year we’ll be introducing version 4.2, another free upgrade for PersonalBrain 4 users. Our focus is on evolving PersonalBrain’s rich editing and Thought creation tools, more integration with desktop applications and focusing on new ways for users to collaborate and share their Brains.

TheBrain on LinkedIn

I just want to throw out a Thank You to Dan Pepper who plugged us on LinkedIn over the weekend:

Q: Ok, a bit off topic, but are there any good mind-mapping/worflow/thought organizing tools out there? I've looked all over the net for the tool I'm needing. It's part visio, part freemind, part org chart... I'm looking for something to organize my ideas with that is less structured than visio and more structured than freemind, maybe along the lines of an outline meeting freemind. Anyone run across something like this?

A: Try the TheBrain from Los Angeles-based TheBrain Technologies. It's free to trial and free for extended personal use. There are fees for commercial and enterprise versions. I could use it in under 2 minutes and there are free topical user webinars on Fridays. While I may be suffering from the "when the only tool you have is a hammer - everything begins to look like a nail" syndrome, I use it for a multitude of purposes. In particular, I use it as an adjunct to LinkedIn to map relationships to members and non-members [you can even load thumbnail photos]. The founder, Harlan Hugh, is a LinkedIn member as is the VP of Sales & Marketing, Shelley Hayduk.

Links:
http://www.TheBrain.com

Regards,
Dan Pepper

Thanks Dan!

Matt

Keyboard Navigation for your PersonalBrain

Keyboard Navigation is Here with PersonalBrain 4.1!

Keyboard Navigation is available in 4.1.Use the Arrow Keys (up, down, left and right) to move to your desired Thought and press Enter to activate the Thought. Shift Enter launches any attached files

Other Keyboard shortcuts you may note be aware of:

Editing and Creating Thoughts
These commands let you edit and create Thoughts related to the active Thought:
F2 Opens the Rename Thought dialog box.
F5 Refreshes the Virtual Thoughts in the current Brain.
F6 Child Thought
F7 Parent Thought
F8 Jump Thought

Searching the Web
F4 Opens the Search Web dialog box

Keyboard shortcuts for PCs
PersonalBrain Hot Key Windows+z opens PersonalBrain and shifts the focus to the Search box when PersonalBrain is hidden in auto-hide mode.

Notes Keyboard shortcuts for PCs
Ctrl+S Save Note
Ctrl+X Cut
Ctrl+C Copy
Ctrl+V Paste
Ctrl+A Select All
Ctrl+F Find

Notes Keyboard Shortcuts for Mac
Command+S Save Note
Comand+X Cut
Command+C Copy
Command+V Paste
Command+A Select All
Command+F Find