About 18 months ago I made teh discovery of a life time, and then promptly forgot about it. I doing some brainstorming for some new courseware I am writing, and finding the brainstorming hard going. Normally this is the easy part, but this time it was a little rough. I was looking through the mind performance hacks book, when it mentioned mind mapping. I just about fell out of my chair.
Mind Mapping is a technique that uses pictures and words to map out either an outline for work, or a brainstorming session for later use. Mind Mapping originated with Tony Buzan’s work. Basically by using a central idea, and then branching off from there you can draw out the ideas from your mind. All I know is that it works very well for me.
I have found that I really don’t like to think lin a linear fashion. My Mind likes to rush around coming up with ideas. Mind maps make it easy for me to capture these fleeting ideas for use. the one thing that really get’s to me is that mind mapping does not work for me on paper. Most of my notebooks are lined notebooks, and I can’t get myself to ignore the lines. Comes from following directions in school. So I had to find a computer software solution.
As is my way I discovered two versions that work well for me, Novamind and Freemind. Novamind comes in both windows and mac versions. It comes in three flavors with different price points. Novamind is a product of Australia which has no bearing on its usefulness, but it is an interesting fact. Freemind is open source and free product. It is actually written in Java which means that is supports any platform that has the JRE installed. The people who maintain it do make different platform versions to make it easier to use the product. Freemind seems to do what I need it to do, and at the right price too.
Mind mapping is a technique that you might want to investigate. If you want software to help you make your mind maps then Novamind or Freemind will get you to where you are going.
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