Organize Your Thoughts With FreeMind
One of the lessons from David J. Schwartz’s classic book, The Magic of Thinking Big is “Action cures fear”. Fears are part of life, but the way to deal with them is finding actions to cure them. But how do we discover what actions could cure a fear. That is where we need brainstorming — alone or with a soulmate.
The Natural Planning Model as described in David Allen’s all time great book, Getting Things Done (aka GTD), suggests that thinking in more effective ways about projects and situations can make things happen sooner, better, and more successfully. That is again with the help of brainstorming.
The outcome of a brainstorming session is a list of actions and success of a brainstorming session depends on how creatively we come up with those actions. One of the ways to facilitate this creative thinking and capturing those action ideas, is by drawing a mind map, a technique popularized by Tony Buzan.
Here is an example of mind map that we had drawn when my daughter had set out for the year of 10th standard.
Although such a mind map can be drawn with a pen and a paper, a digital tool will always be a better choice with obvious benefits (I’ll cover some below). FreeMind is such a tool that helps to draw mind maps. Let me introduce you to this tool and also give you a jumpstart on using it.
FreeMind is free of cost and runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. This is where you download it from. There is also a Mobile app for you to view mind maps on mobile phones.
The procedure to draw mind maps using FreeMind is intuitive. Each item is called a node. Insert key is used to add a child node and Enter key is used to add a sibling node. Conventional shortcuts such as Ctrl+C for copy, F2 to rename a node etc. are available across almost all the functions. Node background or node text can be colored and formatted, to indicate hierarchy level or whatever you wish to. You could also attach an icon to a node to indicate the type or status of an action. Here is a fragment of mindmap of my job interview preparation.
As you brainstorm, you frequently change the order of nodes, introduce a new higher level node, or group some nodes together. All this works very well in a digital tool like FreeMind. You could move around nodes simply by drag and drop.
Sometimes, you may have slightly longer text and to keep your diagram compact you may want to make it a multi-line text. Alt+Enter allows you to split a long text into multiple lines.
You may fold other nodes around when you are focusing on one node. A simple click allows you to fold all the child nodes into a parent node.
You could save a mind map in a file with .mm extension. A mind map can be exported as a picture for you to view in mind map form or into a Open Office Writer document to view in a hierarchy structure:
Try associating problem of anxiety with solution of Mind Map. I encourage you to use this great tool to organize your action thoughts and not just be an action oriented person but also be the best one at it.
