Using mind maps to structure thought and aid planning

At the start of the year I found myself with some time to spare and wanted to fill it with something that carried some substance. I had ideas, I had motivation and I started on the work. I felt productive and things were good. I work some more and I find that more and more ideas are coming and starting to build up in my mind. My head is filling up. I have direction, but for many things and some of them are interrelated and should probably be done in a certain order for efficiency. It's getting complicated and I cant hold in all in my head at one time, my productivity slows because I am thinking more about what I should do rather than doing it.

I have been here before an I recognise the problem. I have seen it with myself, my clients and the teams that I have worked with over the years. Too many directions, great ideas but the focus is getting fuzzy. My go to solution for this is a mind map.

With a mind map you can start with the core problem and then start to map out your ideas. It doesn't need to be structured at the start, just grab the ideas, comments, and thoughts of all kinds and dump it all down into the map. I am a visual planner, this works really well for me. With the mindscape visualised you can start to create order and structure. Group your thoughts and organise.

I use MindMup 2 . It has a very simple to use interface that allows for quick and easy download of ideas and reorganisation of the map. I am sure there are alternatives, but this has all that I need. I have tried a few others over the years but the simple online editing that MindMup give allows it to be used in a much more collaborative way than many of the alternatives which seem to be more focused on creating a good looking diagram for a powerpoint slide. This is valuable sometimes, but not for how I like to use them.

Here is the the map I created. It's a snapshot of my thoughts and I can use that to plan my next moves, (and my next posts here ;)