Practical Project Management

or How to Keep Your Sanity in the Information Age .... as I toil through multiple projects all with a sense of urgency, my methods for managing the tasks, information, resources and people are constantly evolving, but I seem to have hit a sweetspot in the tools that I use ... I think the obvious beginning is at the hub of my projects and for that I use MindManager, time and time again it has allowed quick and ultimately useful sketching out of the idea and what needs to be done, it then evolves into the repository of communications and tasks. I use the note feature to cut and paste emails and random information into a particular topic. I use the task feature to show me the start dates and finish dates to items, this is particularly helpful when you use it as an aging system to see how long a particular item has been going. It becomes easy then to have a simple archive node that serves as your done folder, I take a finished item and simply move it to archive, so you never lose anything that is finished and it does not clutter up the main map. The example I have here is a project that needs many loose ends followed up on and details to be taken care of using other resources and people along with key analysis that must be done once the info is gathered ... did this in less than an hour this morning and have sent out emails, etc based on this ... as the project unfolds, detail is added and things such as spreadsheets and documents are attached to this screen to serve as the project hub ... more to follow on the use of gobinder and the web to complement this ....