Productivity Expert On "Mind Mapping"

>> Dave : As I've watched over the years, I've been fascinated by the tie in between form and function. For instance, again back to my friend Patty Seybold, when her dad had a newsletter she was still a teenager and he tasked her to go research this new thing called word processing which was created to speed up secretary's work. And Patty looked at it and said, oh my God, this is actually a whole different thing - this thing is now gonna mean a very different thing for the office and what it means to interact because now we have something we can cut and paste and move information around in a fast setting way. So I think word processors were a paradigm shifter. I think obviously spreadsheets were and that just took a whole leap in terms of what you can, now you don't need 600 people with whatever for 3 years to figure out something, you can do it in 2 minutes or a minute. I think that shifted the paradigm tremendously, what that was about. I think certainly when both the Apple UI and shortly thereafter, I forget which version of Windows it was where I suddenly could flip to a spreadsheet from my word processor almost as fast as my brain could think; and I watched a paradigm shift right there. The computer became my think station then, as opposed to a place to go do that and then go do these. I could now sit down and let my brain, it would move to a whole different level of gain. So I think that was a paradigm shifting event. I think my mapping and the brain and things like that, I think that's an edge of a next level because I certainly, when I started using my manager ... the mind jet are here I think, and I used inspiration even a while ago when Viewseum first came out with the idea of sort of my mapping. I've been around that game for awhile, and I think there is something new about that. I think it's still in its early stages and I think that combined with physical movement and holograms, is potentially gonna be a very new shift. In other words, anything that would cause me to be able to have ideas I wouldn't have otherwise, to me is a paradigm shifter. And so a lot of what I see is simply speeding up how we slice and dice information. So there's nothing new about that other than just the speed of technology. And that's cool, Google maps is fabulous, I love it too, but all it did was speed up something that you could have done with a foldout map not quite as cool and not kind of classy and not as many cool things embedded in it. I think that starts to push the paradigm a little bit. Let me give you an example. If we didn't go ahead, if I said if I had my druthers, if I'm walking along and I go computer - yes Dave - fun, New York City ballet. Yes Dave. So it knows fun is one of my 20,000 foot areas of focus and responsibility so it automatically goes on there, it automatically sticks ballet on there. And it then knows that whenever my system John puts New York on my calendar, it automatically searches what ballet is in New York and then will send that to me with a little map about where it is and whatever, what the tickets are at that point. That kind of stuff where there's a lot of value added things that will start to happen because of the connections, but I still have to build them in, I still have to know what to do with it, but those kinds of enabling tools I think are probably gonna shift the paradigm. But again it's funny because over all these years, these are grey hairs not sun bleached hair, and in 63 years I've discovered, it takes an awful lot of time to sit down; you gotta actually use the system and push it to actually find out what it's really gonna do. I've never been able to conceptually see a tool or new piece of software and really know whether it would really work or not, I actually had to use it. Because there's something about just, at least maybe it's just me and my learning style, but I've got to get physically engaged and I actually have to push this thing up to then find out whether it'll really work. Is this an inner geek showing up on a rainy Saturday thing, or is this something that'll hold water in the fire hose of reality on Monday morning? That it's very hard to tell, so I'm as much enthralled by what you're doing here and the cool stuff you folks are coming up with because I'm fascinated to see what that's gonna be like, but it'd be very hard to give a reading on it until you're really in there and really pushing it sort of to some of those edges.