Mind Mapping what’s that?

Good question, a mind map is a visual way to organize information, a bit like a spider diagram.

The central thought is written out in a circle in the center, the main ideas are attached to it by branches and then the smaller details are attached to the main idea branches as show in the example below:

As you can see its a more visual way to outline your goals. This example is a nicely presented graphical image, but they work even better when just hand drawn on a blank sheet of paper.

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Why use a Mind Map?

The benefit of mind maps that most people who use them will tell you is because its a more visual way of keeping notes. When we take notes in a traditional way, often we are adding little notations and marks to alert to something important that we need to circle back to later.

This is turn can mean it takes a lot of effort to work out our notes later on.

As with all good planning tools the key to the mind map is its simplicity both to use and to read.

We write in notebooks in a linear way across lines, but our brains don’t process information that way, the mind map matches the visual patterns our brains prefer.

The uses for and benefits to many activities we can gain by Mind Mapping are huge, the below are the most common areas people use mind mapping in:

• Note Taking
• Brainstorming
• Problem Solving
• Studying & Revision
• Planning
• Researching
• Kick starting our creativity

Final Thoughts

There are many more uses that I have missed out here, but the point is anything you do today with lots of notes, you could sort and visualise with Mind Mapping.

It really is a powerful planning tool and needs nothing more than 10 minutes, a pen, paper and your imagination.