Mind Maps: Not Just for Brainstorming Anymore

If you Don River't already usage head maps on a regular basis, you should probably start. And if you are using mind maps as voice of your time unit productivity subprogram, chances are you've come to recognize that they're good for a whole lot more than just unprocessed brainstorming. Here are five great uses for beware maps that go well beyond simple idea generation.

Short letter Taking

This mind map for travel planning illustrates how several tasks and checklists can exist organized.

I take a lot of notes, and I'm perpetually superficial for ways to improve the balance between capturing as a good deal useful selective information as possible and keeping that information structured in a way that I can actually translate later. Dolabriform outline formats and quick notations can help, simply it's almost always challenging to entrance the real context and meaning of everything same in an in-depth presentation or energetic aggroup session.

Mind maps can be a great path to take more organized notes in real time, because they're inherently structured and ceaselessly expansive. It's generally doable to use this approach in theory (I still viscerally prefer paper-and-pencil mind correspondence to software tools for raw capture), merely package apps turn over you enough flexibility that you quite literally cannot run out of space to keep adding new entropy Eastern Samoa it appears.

Presentations

I drive that PowerPoint is pretty a good deal the global standard in presentation tools, simply I interrogative whether it's really the best way to deliver information. For all its improvements in damage of media support, I chance its linear approach to a fault restrictive to present Byzantine ideas in a way that actually matches the right smart I recall about them. (Do you in reality think in bullet points? I Don't. I recollect in terms of connections.)

The next time you're working connected a presentation, consider mechanical drawing it up in a heed map out and check if the catamenia of information International Relations and Security Network't cleanser and clearer than information technology would be in a three-dimensional slip up-and-bullets formatting.

Running Meetings

If you run a good deal of meetings, you probably put a Herculean amount of money of effort into holding the group on track and extracting as some fulfi-worthy information unconscious of the session as possible. One manner to simplify this process is to use a single mind-map for both the preparation and note-taking processes.

By drafting a simple frame of a the major topics you'd like to cover, beforehand of the meeting, you can give your team a crystallize picture of where you'd like the word to go, and intuitively prepare them to contribute on the essential topics. As the meeting rolls on, you can lend new thoughts, contributed ideas, and next-action stairs in historical time. This visual approach give the sack give the whole team up a stronger sense of purpose and direction end-to-end the meeting, and cut up down morale problems imputable meeting fatigue.

Org Charts and Flowing Charts

Mind maps are pocket-size more boxes or bubbles connected aside lines. So are org charts and flow charts. So if you need to work up a chart in a twinkling, consider using your mind mapping app. Some mind map apps include templates planned specifically for these formalized charts.

Event Planning

Whether you're planning an diligence conference or a birthday party for the superior, heed maps are perfectly clothed to capturing all the minutiae in an ordered way. You can use distinct bubbles to represent the layout of a conference across multiple group meeting rooms, or as simple markers of who's bringing what to the political party. The flexibility of the initialise is unbelievably powerful.

All this calendar week, I'll be talking about mind maps. I'll get a load at some of the best apps for your Microcomputer, tablet, and smartphone, and delve into some of the best ways to get the well-nig tabu of your maps for a kind of uses.

Got a great use for psyche maps that I haven't included here? Recite us about information technology in the comments!