Why Mind Mapping?

Yesterday I wrote all about mind maps and why they can be a more efficient way to write notes or a more efficient planning tool.

Today I wanted to write about 10 tasks we can introduce a little bit more fun into, by using the mind map to making a note heavy task much more visual.

The benefit of mind maps that most people who use them will tell you is that they are a more visual way of keeping notes.

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.

Ok so the fun part?

The fun part is making everything more visual and also the ability to set out our notes in a much simpler way, linking the ideas to each other where that makes sense, rather than having to read through linear notes on a page to find what’s needed.

Now to the top 5 uses for mind maps over notes:

• Meeting Notes, so often meetings don’t run to an Agenda, ideas are spat out all over the place and people often go off on tangents. Which can be a nightmare for the note taker. Using a mind map lets you connects all of these ideas and the actions or feedback to the central theme of the meeting as branches. The Mind map is much easier to edit to send out as minutes of the meeting, and much easier and visual for people to read later.
• Project Management Plan, I’m kinda a project manager in my job and one thing I hate is how complicated people make project management, especially with all the text heavy documents required. Instead of writing a novel, I can simply and visually present the project management plan as a mind map. The Project becomes the central box and then my Budget, Resources, Scope, Deadline and People become branches I work and develop from there. Now instead of many pages of words, I just have a visual guide.
• Studying, The same concept as the note taking, often there are a lot of notes and concepts I need to keep track of and those end up a mess with traditional note taking. Revising takes me a lot of time, just to organize my notes, again with the mind map its clearly laid out in branches and so I can tie up notes and concepts easily, giving me more time to focus on my studies.
• Brainstorming, oftentimes the process involves teams coming up with lots of ideas and a lot of notes. Again in a traditional noted form, a lot of the time we lose a lot of the value of the ideas generated, but by sorting and making those ideas notes visual in a mind map we capture much more of the value from these sessions.
• Decision Making, Im a huge fan of decision tree’s for critical decision making and to ensure operational flow through a task. However they are difficult things to write from scratch. I use a mind map first with the team in the same way as I would when Brainstorming and then that out put can be translated from the Mind map into a decision tree clearly and easily.

Final Thoughts

As I said when I wrote an introduction to mind maps yesterday, they are a planning tool I wanted to share, because they work for me and the teams I work with.

Since we started using Mind Maps, we really have found them to be a great productivity hack and a fantastic tool to really capture our thoughts clearly and concisely on a page.

Im not writing here to tell what you need to do, but if your looking for something to take yourself and maybe your teams to the next level, give Mind Maps a closer look, Im certainly glad that I did.

A pen, some paper and a head full of ideas is all you need to get started.