Comments on: Topics du Jour: Give Your Life Direction in Less than 10 Minutes a Day

By: Luciano Passuello

Luciano Passuello — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:09:57 +0000

Pragmatic approaches always work best for me. The moment I realized I could do life planning from the bottom-up was truly liberating, as I tried all sorts of top-down approaches before without any success.

Tom, thanks for sharing the link to the article on becoming more time conscious, and also thanks for including Litemind in the Best of Effectiveness Blogs list.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:23:37 +0000

I do like these more pragmatic (bottom-up) approaches. We have just published a first article on helping one understand what we are doing and when. Back to basics: http://www.whakate.com/lead-ar.....conscious/

By: Luciano Passuello

Luciano Passuello — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:27:15 +0000

Thanks for the book suggestions, Christine. In Journal to the Self, Kathleen Adams also mentions Ira Progroff’s work more than once — I guess it’s time to check it out. And Writing Down the Bones seems even more interesting! I just added both books to my Amazon wish list.
Thanks again!

By: Cool Spots «

Cool Spots « — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:46:16 +0000

[...] For creativity, I found a great post for writing prompts, and journal focus: Litemind [...]

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:18:54 +0000

Many books can inform topic selection. Ira Progroff’s At a Journal Workshop provides a supportive method of reaching inner depths and exploring creativity. Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones offers tag lines to start writing sessions. I enjoy them both regularly.

By: Luciano Passuello

Luciano Passuello — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:43:53 +0000

Erik: Thanks for sharing your approach to Topics du Jour. In terms of organizing the entries, the way it works best for me is having one text file per topic. This way it becomes very easy to analyse trends in a single topic (which is my favorite kind of journal analysis).

By: Erik

Erik — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:20:38 +0000

Wonderful Post!

This has been a great compliment to my GTD approach. I drew up a list of 31 areas that I would like to expand and explore more. That list gets refiled every day in my tickler file. Upon grabbing it in the morning I make a journal entry in my running Google Doc-ument. This approach allows you to lay breadcrumbs where your thinking has gone before allowing you to further elaborate, rather than getting stuck in rethinking “about” things….

Many thanks!

By: Luciano Passuello

Luciano Passuello — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:54:30 +0000

Eric, your ideas on mixing mind maps with wiki are very interesting!

Browsing your site, one thing that really caught my attention was the MindMap Viewer. What a great tool!

Litemind readers frequently ask me how do I embed the mind maps in pages (such as here). Your solution makes it much easier than my cumbersome process (which involves manually importing to Freemind). That’s especially true when it comes to keep the images from the original MindManager map.

Needless to say, I’ll start recommending your MindMap Viewer tool for all readers interested in embedding mind maps in their sites. Thanks for the great tool!

By the way, you just got a new subscriber to your blog…

By: Karen Zara

Karen Zara — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:18:50 +0000

This post made me feel a bit strange, as if there was something missing… now I know what it was: I hadn’t subscribed to your blog yet! *shame on me* I’m going to do it right away. Your articles are too good to be missed.

Thank you for one more post on journaling. It would be great if you wrote a whole post about the ideas that you discussed with Fier (regarding the “Journal Credits” system).

Stumbled and delicioused.

By: Eric Blue

Eric Blue — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:01:07 +0000

Luciano,

Thanks for this post! I’m big on goal setting(please do checkout my post on using mind maps to set goals), and do consider myself a GTD follower and advocate. However, I will be the first to admit that I’ve been less than consistent with my weekly reviews.

It’s odd actually. I can sometimes go for weeks at a time and continually block off time on Fri afternoons. Then, I hit a wall and couldn’t be bothered for a few more weeks at a time. I think you’re point that the review process can be too analytical is valid. Maybe I run out of creative steam after a certain period of time.

At any rate, I really like the idea of Topics du Jour, and have recently recognized the benefits of journaling personally. I’ve been using a unique combination of mindmaps and my wiki to brainstorm and journal in a number of areas (travel log, personal journal, dream journal, workout log, etc). I’ll give this a shot, and do plan to check out your recommendation on Journal to the Self. Definitely good stuff. Thanks!