[LIFE/WORK] Mental maps - Part 1

Part 1

As yesterday said I'll introduce to you the mental map concept in order to better organize what we want to do.

I do not want to explain theory about mental map (for this you can read wiki definition) but I want to underline that this concept tool can help us to collect and prioritize the ideas, tasks, risks and so on about what we are going to project/do.

 

Most of us have a life full of tasks, thinks and continuous interrupts by surrounding world: in one word... stress. For this reason it happens that we do not memorize some intuitions, ideas or, more simply, we are not able to remember what to do!

Memory maps help us for this because in few steps we are able to collect all of above cases in order to use them for our project or to-do task list.

The web offers different software solutions, some free or open source, others with payment: but the interesting thing is that we are not obliged to use a SW but it's also possible to manually write our mental map in a blank sheet... obviously a big map is hard to be represented in a block note sheet!

 

As said before, I prefer to use free/open source SW so, in this post, I will show one of the most popular free solution: XMind.

After a few minutes I've prepared an example of the use of XMind: the purchase of one used car.

Here's the top level map:

Figure 1: Map

As we can see the main topic/task/idea/project (I will call entities from now) is in the center of the map.

As the spider web, all the related entities are placed outside the center: if we have another entity we've to add it. XMind help us to do the best readable topology  because it places the entities based on the model of the map. The Map (Clockwise) is the one that generates the map in the Figure 1.

Figure 2: Possible structures of the map

At this point we can add all the child entities that we have for every main entity.

For example:

 

Figure 3: child and leaf entities

 

With the "..." (dots) notation I indicate that we can add more sibling which can have a more children: one idea can be that I like German cars so I can add an entity named "preferred brand" and include some brands: BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, Bentley, Ford and so on.

The final work is the following map:

 

Figure 4: final map

 

Some notes about it:

• It's a simple example and all entities are reported as I've thought them
• As the main entity is a task based activity, I've included the priority (1 to 6) of the other child entities in fact I cannot drive a car without having bought first! But this not true for mental map about the topics with a not hierarchical entities: in this case the child entities are conceptually at the same level.
• Xmind has automatically colored the children as the main father.
• The leafs entities can be extended and so on...

Next days I'll show to you the benefit with the use of Mental map.

See ya!