Mind Mapping

From the “tools you can use” department, a humble suggestion: FreeMind.

You know those “brainstorming” or “productivity” programs that let you map out your ideas as a cloud of labeled circles, connected by lines? I’m suspicious of them, too. They seem to have a learning curve, and it’s never been clear to me just what to do with my idea-cloud, once I’ve drawn it. And they cost money!

But FreeMind -- which is, indeed, one of those programs -- is, first of all, free, which gets us part of the way there. Also, it’s cross-platform, so I can run it on my Mac and my PC both. And it’s so simple, I forgot to get suspicious. You make a new circle with the “Insert” key -- you type in a label for it -- you press “Insert” again to make another circle. You drag your circles around with the mouse. You don’t spend time prettifying, because there’s really not much you can do.

I started toying with FreeMind while I was thinking about a talk I had to give, and I felt like it was time to try a new tool. (This happens to me every once in a while.)

Since there were only about three things I could do -- again: make circles, label them, and move them around -- I had the germ of my talk laid out before I quite knew what I was doing. Largely, this is the direct result of not having many options, software-wise. The program forces you to keep your drawing in a hierarchy (roots, branches, and sub-branches), so the relationships between the various pieces are always clear. I couldn't spend any time prettyifying my mind-cloud; nor could I spend time deliberating how to arrange things. That part was built in.

Once you have a hierarchy made up, the next thing to do is to spit out the drawing in outline form: plain text. (HTML, actually, so you can open it in a web browser.) In my case, I ended up giving my talk straight from that.

FreeMind is lo-fi -- it doesn’t purport to be a “solution” to anything -- but I kind of like it when a tool doesn’t try to take over my life. Other programs can probably do the same things, but they seem to do so much more, and cost so much more, that it’s like using electric hedge clippers when what I wanted was a pair of scissors. There are probably some features of FreeMind I haven’t mentioned here, but don’t bother with them. Don’t even read the help files. Just start a fresh page and press “Insert”.