I want to do too much. As a result, my mind is often a mess. Especially in times of high inspiration.
You should see the amount of unfinished blog posts sitting in my drafts. When I finally make time to check off one of the many ideas that push into my mind, it’s already popped off the mind stack!
Somewhere along the way last year, I came across the idea of mindmaps. I thought I’d try it out to help organize a company dinner. To my surprise, the way it dissolved the fragmentation in my mind blew me away!
But why should I be surprised? I mean, the most common alternatives are either:
- Spreadsheets
- Columns of lists in a Kanban style (Airtable, Trello, Asana, etc)
- Bullet points (*cough* such as this)
Enter the mindmap. It simply consists of nodes and relationships. Nodes. Relationships. Graphs theory is becoming trendy everywhere. But don’t call it a graph, it’s been here for years. So no eye rolling.
Each node could be an idea, it could be a task, or whatever you want! Some new ways of working are painful, and it can take days of reverse psychology to get into it.
With mindmaps though, I resonated with its advantages within 5 minutes, and just got addicted. These are the core advantages that I found:
- High level— mindmaps naturally discourage irrelevant detail. I’m not a huge fan of capturing large amounts of detail in various ideas that I’m trying to convey, and the mindmap caters to this macro level of thinking. That’s not to say that I don’t capture details, they can just come at a later stage or iterated on in a more suitable doc.
- Relationships —this is a good segue from explaining the benefit on leaving details out of the equation. Why? Because in a mindmap, relationships are the details! Without relationships showing how everything’s connected, the scattered complexity remains in my mind…instead of in a map!
- Organization — a lot of that scattered complexity in my mind is either how these tasks/ideas are categorized among each other, or what order of priority I should do them in. Mindmaps can clarify both.
Once the addiction was unleashed, I decided to brainstorm out everything that I wanted to get to in the next month…or 12. I’ve been using ReatimeBoard lately for user stories, and to my surprise it turned out to be just as elegant in drawing mindmaps.
I called the result 2019 Growth, for lack of a better term. “Things To Do In 2019” or “2019 Todo List” didn’t seem as snappy. A screenshot of what I’ve got so far is below:
As you can see, it’s really simple to start off with a few very broad categorizations and then branch off from there.
Typically, I divided the broad categorizations into what mainly occupies my spare time — 1) Educating myself on tech (coding, frameworks, new advancements such as machine learning, etc), 2) doing actual Development in tech (building apps, open source, etc), and 3) Blogging (on tech…and mindmaps).
I could easily add in extra broad nodes for cooking and fitness if I wanted to.
As you can see, as each node branches out, the corresponding node is a little more descriptive. RealtimeBoard also has this nifty feature where it allows you to enable each node as a hyperlink to a URL if you want, which I’ve put to good use to double up as somewhat of a book reading list.
As I complete each end node, I decided to simply add a green tick emoji ✅ as a new node.
That’s about all there is to it. I hope you’re getting ideas as to how to dump all of the complexity in your mind into a single visual representation.
I can’t help but feel that this is the blog post that my mother would’ve written to my 15 year old self, when she was trying to inspire me to self-organize to reach new stratospheres of studying in school. But I don’t care. I like mindmaps.
No, I love mindmaps — they are game changing and I’m not ashamed to admit it!
