Review - GyroQ

Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ones. This is just such an example.

GyroQ is a tiny piece of software that lurks in the Windows toolbar. Click the icon and up pops the window above. Type in a thought you want to capture and press Enter or click Add and it disappears, not into the ether, but into a Mind Manager mind map, waiting to be accessed as and when you want.

At its most basic, that's all there is to it. GyroQ lets you capture ideas as and when they come up, and slip them out of the way for future reference. This makes a huge amount of time management sense. If you are concentrating on a task, then it's all too easy to be distracted by new ideas, phone calls and the like. Whenever you get an interruption to what you are doing, just hit GyroQ, the window pops instantly, type in a reminder and send it away. When it suits you, click the "Send Queue" button. This sends any ideas you have queueing up to Mind Manager, opening up a "GyroQ Daily Capture" mind map, which structures your ideas by date you had them.

You can then do what you like with them - restructure them, start new mind maps from them, just throw them away - whatever you need to get some benefit from that thought.

Two things I particularly liked about GyroQ where its immediate response - no waiting for it to pop up - and the tag feature. By default, when you type something in it's labelled as an idea, but if you click the Tag button you can cycle through a number of options for classifying it. Initially these are "action item" coloured red, and the very clever "information" item, coloured green, which takes anything you've got in the clipboard along with it into the mind map. Extra tags can be downloaded from Gyronix's site, or with the developer edition you can produce your own.

Of course, this is just an add-on - you do need a copy of Mind Manager, but if you are already a Mind Manager user, it is well worth considering. (Note needs to be MindManager 5 or later - see website for exact version details.) If you already use Microsoft's OneNote, you may find GyroQ unnecessary, as OneNote provides a more comprehensive way of handling quick notes and much more.

Download now

Gyronix provide a 15 day free trial option for GyroQ - click here to go their site. You will be offered either a straight download, or to "accept our invitation and get a download". Please use the "accept an invitation" option, which registers that you were invited to do so by Creativity Unleashed, if you don't mind - but if you would prefer them not to know who referred you, use the "just a download" option.