![]() ![]() MyMind is gone now, but it was a great altertative on the Mac, and it took years for me to find something I was happy with on Apple platforms. Freeplane now has a pretty decent extension ecosystem, but it never supported iOS, so I never actually used it for more than a couple of days. I have always been at odds with the likes of Freemind and Freeplane because despite being free, they are horrendously clunky (not to mention ugly as sin). ![]() I did too, back when I was working at Vodafone, and used it for notes (it was reasonably good at that), but today it is an ancient, antiquated piece of software that has been superseded by much better things. I think everyone got started with Freemind, just because it was one of the first half-decent desktop apps and, being Java, ran nearly everywhere. Early Software This is MyMind, which I used on my iBook G3 Outlines lack visual hooks, drawing conventional diagrams or drafting conventional notes takes too much focus away from what is going on, and mind maps, with the right tools, are great for quickly sketching out procedures, task lists, and even entire projects.įor me, speed is essential – I often share my screen and build out a mind map while discussing things, annotating it as the meeting progresses.Īnd the ability to quickly grab an entire tree and move it to a new context trumps building highly complex and organized layouts that are treated like bonsai – so my mind maps tend to be highly asymmetrical affairs, representing projects, decision trees, or just a knowledge domain I’m exploring in a project. There are many online “solutions” for mind mapping, but I refuse to use any of them since I want to own my data and nearly all of them are woefully limited and kludgey, so for the past few years I’ve been using native apps only, all of which I can get my data out of if needed. So I will typically start out building a mind map of the things that I find weird or potentially risky in a particular project, and then, as I build a more structured view of the work itself (which is typically around people, outcomes and timelines) move them into the right places to figure out how to deal with them. There’s a certain sense of accomplishment from visually laying out things, and the spatial relationships really help in terms of recollection and focus. ![]() In particular, I find that the work of actually mapping out things and their relationships helps me focus on even the dreariest of matters, something that has been extremely useful during the pandemic and various episodes of near-burnout. I like mind maps because they leverage my visual memory in ways no other tool does, and make structure immediately apparent in ways no other organizational tools can in a number of situations: note-taking, planning, and even live discussion.Īnd that works not just for myself but also when working with others, since the relative positions of nodes can be as informative (and often more memorable) than entire sentences. For reasoning things out, understanding dependencies and (ultimately) figuring out what what needs to be done, I use mind maps - sometimes for a single project, sometimes for an entire domain of work (or personal interests). Keeping track of the bigger picture, though, is another matter. Wikis (like this site, and vimwiki for smaller things) have mostly fixed that problem too. ![]() Mail may be out of fashion, but flagged messages are still a good blend of To Dos and my documentation. So I usually have tasks in mind maps as part of a context, which means that when I am looking at a task, I usually have all the info required to do it right alongside.Īnother thing that really works for me instead of hunting through various project tools (or chat windows, or notes in OneNote, or Kanban boards, or whatever) is just keeping unresolved threads in my inbox, which again provides me with all the context I usually need. Jumping The Queueįirst off, and since I make extensive use of mind maps to keep track of activites and task lists, let’s get the “Getting Things Done” elephant out of the room – I find To Do lists, checklists, or any other form of standalone task tracking to be less than useless, since they inevitably turn into a dumping ground of miscellanea, sitting in their little isolated app.īut I tend to be almost obsessively methodical (and depth first) in some things, so I try to capture current state of what I am doing, so that I can get up to speed quickly if I’m interrupted (which I almost always am). I don’t think of myself as particularly organized, but I do like to prioritize and reason things out both visually and conceptually with at least a modicum of order, and over the years the only approach (other than notetaking) that has consistently stuck with me is mind mapping. ![]()
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