But finding the right portfolio on the internet is hard. This is really a task where searching sucks! If I only relied on google to find one, I would have to choose between a couple of brands, and a lot of cheap no-name leather outlets.

Another issue is the tactile experience. Touching and having really good close-up look are key to finding what you want. So right now I have actually found most of the candidates for my next portfolio in actual stores!

Here a my wishes for a portfolio

• It must be zipped... because I use a lot of loose papers
• I prefer nice quality leather
• I'm looking for a minimalistic tasteful design. No inbuilt calculators or strong product branding
• It must be A4

Right now I'm looking at this shortlist of portfolios:

Tumi Meridian Zipped Pad

This is quite nice. Well designed interior. It has a nice big pocket for loose papers. I must say though, that I found it a little boring. This could be something for an accountant. Not a very luxuious feel to it either. But it's rather sturdy. This was about 900 DKR.

Filofax Domino

This is the one that I had until last week when the zipper broke. It has been really nice. Not the best build quality though. It's made of faux leather so the feel of it isn't as nice as I would like. I considered upgrading to the Finsbury series to have a better quality but that one is just plain ugly. The interior is ok. The pockets for paper are of no use cause they are to tight. I'm considering buying another one though, because the Filofax Domino is cheap! It'll be mine for only 349 DKR

Aspinal of London - Executive Zipped Portfolio

This looks really nice. Haven't handled it personally, but it has the looks! It like it for it's simplicity and old school luxury style. It's a little pricey though at 1500 DKR.

Smythson Mara Brown Zipped Portfolio_

Awww man. This one looks amazing. I'm already a sucker for Smythsons expensive notebooks and I could easily be a sucker for this one as well. EASILY! You can have your name engraved in gold for 60 DKR a letter. What a bargain! And of course I would have to shell out 3.300 DKR

Gianni Conti Cognac Leather Portfolio

This one was wonderfull in the hands. Smooth like a loving caress. And I loved colour too. A stylish cognac brown with a fine patterned lining. Unfortunately it had a rather vulgar branding on the front. I don't want to be a walking commercial for some leather manufacturer. The price was reasonable at 900 DKR.

I haven't got any pictures of the Gianni Conti, because the website looks like this:

That's an awesome online store :D

What would you buy? Got any got ideas? Please post ideas in the comments

— Jens Poder

When writing this blog post Filofax actually wrote me and promised to replace my domino! Kudos Filofax :)

Nerd alert :) And have a nice weekend!

• Jens Poder

I fooled around with the application Document Palette yesterday, and quite liked the service it offered. Being able to make a new file from a template with a couple of keystrokes. But I hated having a dedicated app cluttering up my dock to do this.

I would like nothing more than be able to launch a new meeting minutes document, or a new prepopulated HTML document from my favourite launcher launchbar with a couple of keystrokes.

I think the solution could be a homebrew applescript to do this, so this is my new sideproject.

This would bring the number of applescripts deeply embedded into my workflow up to 4. I have these already:

• Take current mail, copy content to evernote with tags, then archive mail in archive folder.
• Take current mail, copy content to TheHitList (todo manager), then archive in archive folder.
• Tweet this via launchbar. Tweets to twitter with tinyurling and other niceties.

It's a geeky delight to be able to cut corners with these little scripts. Every time I invoke them, from a snow leopard service or from launchbar, smily wrinkles form around my blue eyes.

Autofocus gives you a simple list and easy fun rules to guide your proces

I recently read about this system by Mark Forster. Autofocus is a todolist system based on simple rules, and an in-built trust in your own innate ability to sense the right thing to do right now.

The autofocus system will appeal to people with a fondness for paperbased systems, and particularly the Moleskine Crowd.

Here's how Mark Forster describes it himself:

1. Read quickly through all the items on the page without taking action on any of them. 2. Go through the page more slowly looking at the items in order until one stands out for you. 3. Work on that item for as long as you feel like doing so 4. Cross the item off the list, and re-enter it at the end of the list if you haven’t finished it 5. Continue going round the same page in the same way. Don’t move onto the next page until you complete a pass of the page without any item standing out 6. Move onto the next page and repeat the process 7. If you go to a page and no item stands out for you on your first pass through it, then all the outstanding items on that page are dismissed without re-entering them. (N.B. This does not apply to the final page, on which you are still writing items). Use a highlighter to mark dismissed items. 8. Once you’ve finished with the final page, re-start at the first page that is still active.

I like several things about the autofocus system:

1. it's compact

I love to be able to walk around with my system all the time. Capturing ideas depends on this. I must admit that my Iphone with Omnifocus is used a lot less, than I had imagined. My test-run of autofocus had me capture more stuff, and remembering more as well.

2. it's simple

It's not complicated. I tend to lose my perspective when everything is sorted in projects and contexts. Especially the context part of GTD makes less sense to me than ever. I don't really need anything besides @work and @home. Autofocus urges to have two lists. One for work and one for private stuff.

3. it gets rid of old todo-list garbage

The idea of dismissing old items when you look at a page without anything standing appeals to me a lot. The thing I get rid of this way, is the non-doable things, that seems to creep into every todo-list I make. In autofocus you highlight it, and then someday later you can review these dismissed items and totally forget them, put them on a someday/maybe list og or re-enter them in another form.

4. it's fast!

You can do this really fast. With 22 lines per page, you can quickly skim a page. Adding new items is lightning fast. And since you never grow your list to more than 10-15 pages, findign something is actually quite simple.

5. it's in a moleskine

Well... you gotta love a moleskine. I love touching them. I love carrying them. I love looking at them. Well... maybe it's just me :)

Anyways... that's it. A simple analouge system that you can check out at the blog of Mark Forster. The decribtion of the system is a mere 6 pages in the printer. So go ahead read about it. I have been using it for my home stuff for a week now, and I'm pretty happy. I am considering moving my someday/maybe lists into Taskpaper, but that's another story.

Oh... by the way... drawing  on the top was made with wonderful children focused drawing app: Doozla.

• Jens Poder

Overall, Omnifocus is very nice. It does everything you want it to do. It syncs with my mac through mobileme, and that is the killer value I wanted. One system to rule it all...

But it has a couple of problems, that I find annoying, especially considering the price. It is among the most expensive Iphone apps.

It's still in beta! You are actually participating in Omnigroups development phase. This means you're risking your vital data. I would be in deep trouble, should I loose my todo-data. This has happened to some users! So beware! Daily builds and upgrades is part of the iphone omnifocus experience.

It's rather slow! When opening, it loads everything, and it really takes quite a long time. I tend to leave Omnifocus running when putting my iphone to sleep. This lets me start my iphone in omnifocus and capture stuff to the inbox faster. I would love a quick fast capture app, to put stuff into the inbox, without loading and syncing and whatnot. Speed is of the essence, when you want to capture something.

Mobileme syncronization is expensive. I'm not a big mobileme fan. In my view it's just a pricey bundling of services pioneered by others. It's the one product category where Apple isn't innovating. So I would love a simple way to sync my data without the mobileme webdav. Perhaps some of you out there have ideas.

All in all, it works. But it isn't the power-experience you have come to expect from the makers of OmniOutliner, OmniGraphle and OmniFocus for mac. It works. But it didn't blow me away.

• Jens Poder

• OmniFocus for iPhone: Location-Aware Contexts and More | 43 Folders

• Jens Poder

At last I have found a reason to start saving up for an Iphone! , my favourite todo-manager for mac, is building on a version for the Jesusphone! They said so themselves in the latest upgrade version document.

As some of you know, I frequently use stuff I have an irrational craving for as rewards in complicated weekly review reward-schemes. Read about my quest for a semi-pro coffee-grinder if you want to know how I do it.

Since I switched jobs my review routines have been falling apart. So it's time for another round of "buy yourself something remarkable in exchange for good GTD behaviour!"

So something remarkable has to be:

• Expensive
• Something I have an irrational desire to get
• Something I wouldn't buy otherwise

I dare you to come up with something that suits this description better than an Iphone!

The Iphone version of OmniFocus will be released in june. So soon. I better be a good weekly reviewer.

• Jens Poder

Danish furniture maker Holmris Hansen has launched this cool table. MILK is designed to remove all cable clutter from your view, and offers a lot of discrete places to store stuff as well.

Check it out here: http://www.milk.dk

- Jens Poder

A question is a powerful thing. It guides us to find the relevant answers. And knowing what questions to ask is a skill that can earn you a lot of money as a consultant.

A new batch of ChangeThis presentations have been released and one of these is "Questionating" by Corinne Miller.

Questionating is a process to develop, use and improve QuestionBanks. QuestionBanks are organized collections of thought-provoking questions, conveying expert—as well as diverse—thinking on a particular topic to inspire innovative solutions. QuestionBanks can be used anywhere decisions need to be made: new products and services, leadership, meeting and event planning, sales and marketing, strategic planning, etc.

Building a Questionbank is a 4 step proces:

• Identify question sources: Where can I find questions relevant to my goal
• Collect questions: For example; write to 30 project managers and ask them what to ask before you start your project.
• Sort
• Refine: When you have used your questions a couple of times, then cut out the non-effective questions, to get to the core selection of important questions.

I really like this approach. I reminds me of the zen-idea of starting with a beginners mind. I will try this out soon.

- Jens Poder

Changing my computer platform to a MAC has rendered my existing license on Mindjets Mind Manager software useless (UPDATE: Mindjet wrote to me yesterday and told me that they actualy would let customers switch from Windows to MAC for free!). Instead, I have been trying out some free online mindmapping tools, and the one that has caught attention is a cute little one called bubbl.us.

Nice graphics and Super Fast

The cute thing about Bubbl.us is of course the graphics. I love cute, simple, “hug me” graphics, with low level of complexity in the user interface. And Bubbl.us certainly delivers on this.

Every idea has it’s own little cute glassy round-edged box. If you delete one it dissappears with a little animated explosion and a pow-sound. That’s the sort of thing that makes smiley wrinkles around my eyes.

It’s very simple to drag and drop to reposition ideas, and you can change the color of boxes.

Making new idea bubbles is very fast. As you type you just hist ENTER or TAB to start typing in a new box. This can be quite confusing, but it certainly lets you produce a lot of idea-nodes in a short time. Great for brainstorming.

I get a lot Ideas into Bubbl.us quite fast, but the result tend be a bit messy. But you can rearrange them later.

They should though consider supporting a wider range of keyboard shorts. Navigating around your mindmap with the arrows and being able to delete nodes would be nice.
I use the mouse a lot when I use Bubbl.us.

Save mindmaps online and share

You save your maps online. This means you can reach them from any computer, and you can share them with friend to do collaborative maps. You can also get a piece of code to embed it in your blog.
This is standard web2.0 features, but I haven’t really found much use for it. My mindmaps tend to be pretty personal and not very easy to share.

Compared to Applications

Compared to an application like Mindjet Mindmanager, there’s a lot of features Bubbl.us doesn’t provide.

This isn’t necessarily a big problem. A lot of features can really be a mixed blessing for an app, but there’s range of tasks that Mind Manager does that won’t be effective with Bubbl.us.

• Outlining and exporting to Word
• Handling tasks
• Very big and complex maps. Bubbl.us has a limitation in the screen-real estate. Also hierarchies between things tend to be les easy to visually comprehend

And then there’s the keyboard interface. The basic keyboard navigation is much better in a rich application.

Great for Outlining & Brainstorming

What Bubbl.us is really suited for is brainstorming and outlining.
An this is probably why I like it so much. It’s the way I start almost any creative project.
Just get a load of ideas of your mind into bubbl.us, sort them, and then switch to another app, and start producing your content.

PNG - export

One thing I really love about Bubbl.us is the export feature. You’ll find It in the lower right corner under the “menu”.

The specific feature I use is the “export to PNG file” feature. Why?

Well first of all… It’s just really convinient also to have an offline copy lying on your desktop to instantly check out.

But on top of this Bubbl.us exports your map as a beautiful PNG with a transparent background. This means, that you can use it on top of other pictures.

If I need to make an illustration for Powerpoint or Keynote, this feature will let me put a mindmap on top of the background image or other images without. This is really cool. Check it out here:

Conclusion

So all in all I’ll really recommend Bubbl-us as an online mindmapping tool for fast creative brainstormy mindmapping.

It’s not the most tooled-up mindmapper out there. My old favourite Mindmanager from Mindjet.com certainly has a lot more bells and whistles.

But the point is… most of the time these features aren’t really needed, and then they just get in the way.
Happy mindmapping.

- Jens Poder

Related links:

• Mindmeister.com - another online mindmapper. Resembles Mind Manager from Mindjet a lot. Has a couple of cool dashboard widget you can download.
• Mindomo.com - Also a Mind Manager wannabee like Mindmeister.
• How to make a mindmap - Introduction to the technique by mindmap-inventor Tony Buzan
• Mindmap Ressources Compiled - By Diyplanner; a long list of mindmapping ressources.

Tags: mindmapping, bubbl.us, tools, creativity