Image courtesy of Lifehacker
Do you like Mind-Mapping things?
Every time I think about mind maps I’m forced to recall my 111 year old History teacher… I think our assumption of his age was spawned mainly from the fact that he was REALLY old and he, rightfully, taught an ancient subject.
Apart from all the lessons I spent listening to Mr. McFarland’s heavily sedating Irish voice go on and on and on. One thing did stick, though: Mind Maps. Towards my third year of being educated by Mr. McFarland, he was suddenly possessed by some mind-map-spirit that transformed his whole classroom into a monastery for mind map monks. All we used to do was draw mind maps. Note that we never took notes- we drew mind maps. A lot of the time he’d stress the importance of these little (sometimes big) pages of scribble in our files, he often spoke about how these would help us a great deal after high school.
3-years later and I’m a law student with hardly any sign of text inside his notebook just lines and circles and colours and… stuff.
These things work so so well.
Courtesy of Tumblr
Here are some benefits of creating mind maps:
- Mind Maps generate ideas.They’re great for brainstorming and even better, they work super well for gaining insight as you see how your ideas fit together giving you a glimpse of the “deep structures that underlie your thinking and make new and unexpected connections.
- Mind maps will help you plan as you can visually prioritize and assign resources.
- Mind maps are great way of bringing to surface the strengths and weaknesses of your plans and projects. By looking at the map, you can see which route to take and which to abandon
- Last but not least (especially not for me) is the issue of keeping track. As any law student will tell you: we have to remember a lot of things! And a list will simply NOT cut it! Lists are long and too “wordy”.Mind maps offer a far more graphic experience, helping you visually associate words and phrases with different colors; blocks; shapes and lines.
Mind mapping gets you organized.
In comes MindMup. This app let’s me abandon my writing pad for a while. There’s a lot of mind mapping tools and software out there but this app comes out superior for one of many reasons… It’s on your browser. So, there is no more need to keep Alt + Tab-bing whenever you are reading an article and then trying to map it as you carry-on . Now you can do all that plus store your maps in your Google Drive and be able to export your mind maps as PDF or as an HTML document.
So, if you’re like me and usually only have Chrome open- this app is a DREAM for productivity.
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