- If you are in the middle of a project and you need to organize your ideas in a visible, concise way you can use “mind mapping” software.
- You can find many alternatives online that are free, here’s a comprehensive wiki at Wikipedia about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software
Projects, everyone has their own.
We all have projects, from organizing a vacation, a football game a wedding, we never stop finding things to do with our short lives.
There is however, a constant; to organize our projects we need to make lists:
A party? guest list… shopping list…
A trip? travel items checklist…
A cake? ingredients list…
Some projects are very straightforward and may not require lists at all, our brain can cope with worldly tasks, I mean, we are not stupid, are we? – that is, until we comeback home from a shopping trip and we realize that we forgot an item.
No problem there, you forgot the eggs for the cake, nobody will die from that, right?
What if your project were more important that just baking a cake, let’s say you are preparing to become the next Victor Hugo and you have just begun the next Les Misérables.
How would you prepare the plot, the relationships between the characters, how would you take care of the continuity and coherence of your work?
What if you are going to start a business with a group of friends? You will all have different ideas and you will eventually need to sit down together and brainstorm them.
Of course, some say that many great ideas started at a café on a paper napkin, but also, many ideas got lost forever on a paper napkin.
Some tools can shorten the path between ideas and execution.
If you were Julius Cæsar and you one day decide that you have to cross the Rhine to teach those unruly Germanic tribes a lesson and secure your eastern border (after all you’re busy conquering the Gauls) you will need to build bridges out of nothing.
You have to talk to your chief military engineers about your plans, they in turn will have to draw plans and decide who does what and when and how.
For millennia we as humans have organized great architectural and engineering works, all of which must have started as ideas. These ideas had to be put somewhere, where everyone who would execute them could see them.
Throughout history, blueprints for bridges, towers, tunnels and aqueducts have been found all over the world.
OK, I’ve made my point, every project needs a plan and a way to display it.
Modern tools.
We, certainly at this day would not expect people to note everything down and make exact replicas of what we are thinking our project should be, not with the tools we have at our disposal.
Just as leather and paper served as a great conduct to organize and display ideas in the past; nowadays our netbooks, laptops, tablets, smart phones can do the same.
Here’s a small example: for a long time I had an array of websites dedicated to different aspects of my creative life, now I’ve decided to put them all together in one site: this one.
Here’s a rough draft (oops, we are supposed to say “mind map”) that helped me organize the topics in which I wanted to divide the categories of this site:
Two examples of mind mapping software.
I’m using MindnodeNode (Mac) http://www.mindnode.com/ a nifty little program that apart from being great it’s free.
If you want a similar version in Windows (or Linux) you can get Freemind: at sourceforge.net
Most mind mapping software comes with the capability of exporting to a universal format called: OPML which is based on XML.
Meaning: if Peter has a Mac and uses MindNode, he can export his mind map file in the OPML format so John can open it on his Windows machine using a OPML compatible mind mapping software such as FreeMind.
Some programs may even export directly to the native FreeMind format.
What about the mobile folk? the people who would have am immediate heart attack if their Blackberries/iPhones stopped working for 10 minutes?
There is mind mapping software for the iPhone, Blackberries and Android mobile devices, too.
Here’s a good place to look for them:
http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/category/mobile-mapping-tools/
So what are you waiting for? Organize your ideas with mind mapping tools!
Thank you and leave a comment if you’d like.
