Do you plan effectively? Become laser focused with Mind Mapping! | Digital Art Empire

Do you plan effectively? Become laser focused with Mind Mapping! Digital Art Empire

What is mind mapping?
Mind mapping is designed to mirror how the brain functions in a radiant manner rather than linear.

Picture the internet without links and pictures – just lines of text with no relation or connection - perhaps with a doodle here and there – this is what your notes plans and essentially strategy is without a map, a mind map.

A mind map is simple a way to express your thoughts on paper using associations connections and triggers to cultivate further ideas.

It’s similar to how Mnemonics works in that it uses all your faculties to recreate your mental processes. Mnemonics is a way of remembering things through associating easy to remember ideas and data. So for example a song is used to remember your new office address. This is how people display extraordinary feats of memory

How it works
The basic idea behind a mind map is that you write down your initial idea with an image, say a simple initial idea for a project. From there you can draw branches to the programs you may use, the places you’ll have to visit and how long this may take.

Popularity
Since its creation 1960’s by Tony Buzan, it has had a widespread use in almost all industries including design studios across the globe. It is acknowledged it is used by 250 million people.

Here Chris Pirillo talks about the benefits of mind mapping and some online software to help you mind map.

A few tips to help you mind map
Mind mapping especially for a creative boost should be fun, draw out the initial idea, which could be anything from the clients brief, your audience or even just some colors. The main idea is link as many choices as possible together with as many triggers as you can, visually. Then label the first sketch with something memorable and descriptive.

The structure is like a tree, with one branch leading to another pool of ideas and choices. Once you have the first few ideas down you can go ahead and add more detailed images or if you like memorable colours. For example the red ideas could represent a deadline, or a drawing of a book could mean the Facebook app your developing.

Free mind mapping software:
Freeplane is a free, open source software application for creating mind maps (diagrams of connections between ideas), and electronic outlines. Written in Java, Freeplane is supported on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Compendium is a computer program and social science tool that facilitates the mapping and management of ideas and arguments. The software provides a visual environment that allows people to structure and record collaboration as they work through “wicked problems”.

WikkaWiki (often shortened as Wikka) is a free, lightweight, and standards-compliant wiki engine. Written in PHP, it uses MySQL to store pages. WikkaWiki is a fork of Wakka Wiki to which a number of new features have been added. It is designed for speed, fine-grained access control, extensibility, and security, and is released under the GNU General Public License.

VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) is a free, open source concept mapping application written in Java. The application is developed by the Academic Technology group at Tufts University. VUE is licensed under the Educational Community License. VUE 3.0, the latest release, was funded under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

SciPlore MindMapping is a mind mapping application written in Java. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License and based on the open source software FreeMind. The focus of SciPlore MindMapping is on combining mind maps with PDF and reference management.

XMind is an open source brainstorming and mind mapping software tool developed by XMind Ltd. It helps people to capture ideas, organize to various charts, and share them for collaboration. It supports mind maps, fishbone diagrams, tree diagrams, org-charts, logic charts, and spreadsheets. It is often used for knowledge management, meeting minutes, task management, and GTD. XMind is compatible with FreeMind. The latest version is XMind 3.

Pimki is a PIM derived from the Ruby-based Wiki-clone, Instiki, written and maintained by Assaph Mehr. It is “the place to dump your brain, organise your thoughts and Get Things Done.”

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool.