Chuck The Geek.com

Mind Mapping

July 4th, 2008 by Chuck Sharp

Tony Buzan wrote a really fun book years ago called The Mind Map Book. This book introduces the concept of mindmapping, where one starts with a central concept and branches out ideas in associative ways. Here’s an example of an old school, paper mind map:

These can become very complex:

These are useful for a number of things, like brainstorming, studying, taking notes from a book or lecture, and organizing papers, plans, and life in general. Naturally, many people have written software to provide mindmapping capabilities to the PC.

My personal favorite mind mapping software is Mind Manager by Mindjet. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it to me. I can create mind maps to organize thoughts, plan things, collect a lot of ideas fast (brainstorming on steroids), and get a bird’s-eye view of a project or area of life. Here’s a quick brain dump of different happenings and thoughts:

You can get incredibly detailed as well.

It’s very possible to customize the maps in very clever and useful ways, like this:

All in all, Mind mapping is a very useful tool. I use it from everything to planning my vacations to working out work project alternatives to tracking finances to organizing research. It’s really easy to link websites, images, PDFs, spreadsheets, and outlook items to mind maps.  You can assign to-do items, markers, priorities, colors, resources (who, where, how long), and even full notes to map items.

If you want to try this, but don’t want to spend $350, try Freemind, which is open source mind mapping software. It’s similar to MindManager, but not as full featured. It’s still very good though, and worth trying out (can’t beat the price, either).

Entry Filed under: Productivity, Review