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Getting organized in 2018 – Mindmanager

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Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series

If you’ve been following this series you know that the tools I use most frequently are: pen and paper,1 OmniFocus,2 Evernote,3, Dropbox, and Ulysses. Those are the tools I’d be lost without. Last week I introduced a tool that I could live without, but that I find very handy, Scrivener. This week I’ll briefly describe another tool I find handy. It’s one that I could live without more easily than Scrivener, but it still comes in handy. It’s a mind-mapping tool called MindManager.

Like Scrivener, MindManager is available for both Mac and Windoze. Unlike Scrivener, the features available in the Windoze version seem to be much more advanced and flexible.4Although the Mindjet site5 promises that you’ll find MindManager useful for brainstorming, visualizing data, flowcharts, and project management, I’ve only used it for brainstorming. For that it is very useful.

I am lousy at visual thinking, but I’m trying to get better, and mapping out concepts in a concept map is an easy way for someone like me who thinks very verbally to start making my ideas more visual. I’ve discovered that making my thoughts visual – admittedly just a pretty outline – makes it easier for other people to understand them. But it is more than just a pretty outline. It’s easy to move pieces of a map around. It’s easy to promote or demote them in a hierarchy, and I often find that after I’ve played with a map for a while, new ideas are occurring to me that wouldn’t have popped into my brain if I’d been trying the same thing in a Word outline or outline mode in Emacs.6

If you’re not familiar with mind mapping, visit mindmapping.com and look around. If you want to see an example of how I’ve used it, take a look at this mind map derived from a 2013 meeting of the Dimensions of Biodiversity team working on Protea and Pelargonium in South Africa. It’s written in HTML 5 and directly exported from MindManager.

Click on the little bubbles with numbers, and you’ll see details pop out. Click on the little circles with “-“, and you’ll see the details collapse. The version you’re looking at is read-only, so you can’t change the text or the structure. You can either imagine what it’s like to drag any piece of this map anywhere else, add anything you like at any lever, or delete anything you don’t want, or you can get a trial version of MindManager and try it out yourself.

If you’re interested in mind mapping, you owe it to yourself to spend a little time investigating the links you’ll find from a Google search. There are free mind mapping tools available, and there’s a good chance they’ll be plenty to satisfy your needs. I use MindManager (a) because I started with it years ago and (b) I like the export options (PDF and HTML 5), but your mileage may vary.

  1. More details here and here ↩
  2. More on how I use OmniFocus here. ↩
  3. More on Evernote here and here. ↩
  4. I say “seem to be” because I’m going on what the product descriptions say. I haven’t used MindManager on Windoze in so long I can’t claim to have any direct experience with it. ↩
  5. Mindjet is the corporation that produces MindManager ↩
  6. I haven’t tried OmniOutliner from the folks who produce OmniFocus. It’s possible that I’d get the same advantage from using that. Maybe it’s just the ease of manipulating the objects in an electronic form that makes MindManager work for me. But I do think it’s more than that. Even for someone as non-visual as I am, somehow seeing the relationships makes them clearer. ↩