I’ve recently got into the habit of having a Free Mind window open as well as my editor or whatever, it means I can jot things down in a mind map so I can go back to them later. It works with programming and development work too, obviously not the same mind map.
I also use two screens (but my new work laptop’s wide screen is pretty good on its own). The map in one screen and the document or editor in another. Pretty good. I use the Windows XP desktop manager power tool (look it up on Google). This means that I have 8 screens.
I general screen set 1 is email and stuff, 2 is Windows media player, 3 is development work and 4 is things like DOS windows running Apache or Mongrel. Works quite well for me.
MS Word is annoying me though. I want to split the screen vertically and have different parts of the document on display (particularly useful with a new wide screen – you could have 3 different parts of the document on display). But it only allows you to split vertically – sigh. It’s interesting but I think one of its antecedents was Emacs, and you can split that every which way from Thursday, even have different windows onto the same document.
I might see if there is a Word document editor that can do this. I have’t the energy to write my own…