By Bill Mann
For people who work with information, the problem used to be
finding enough of it. If you were analyzing a subject, or
writing a report, most of your time was spent finding the
information you needed. Today, finding information isn't
the problem - avoiding drowning in too much information is.
With the Internet and other new information technologies, the
biggest problem for knowledge workers today is organizing
information and staying focused. If this problem sounds
familiar to you, you should investigate mind mapping.
As a freelance technology writer, I use mind mapping
extensively. It helps me to organize masses of information in
ways that make sense to me, and simplifies the job of
designing the articles and books that I create. Mind mapping
is also a powerful tool for note taking, where it engages the
visual side of your brain to help you remember.
So what is a mind map, anyway?
A mind map is a visual representation of chunks of information
and the relationships between those chunks. Starting with a
central topic, idea, or theme, you create a mind map by
writing a phrase that identifies the central theme in the
center of a piece of paper. Next, you write words or phrases
identifying key topics on the page, arranging them around the
central theme. Draw lines between the topics and the central
theme to show that they are related. You can also connect
topics directly to each other.
A topic and its connection to the central theme or another
topic is called a branch. Branches graphically indicate the
relationships between topics. This representation is one of
the significant benefits of mind mapping. Such relationships
are seldom clear in more traditional means of note taking,
which don't have such a clear and obvious way of
representing connections.
To expand the map, you repeat the process. Treat each topic
as if it were the central theme, and create branches
containing information related to that topic. In general,
each iteration of this process leads to branches containing
more detailed information, until you have a map of all the
important information related to the central theme. This is
your mind map.
Some of the benefits of creating a mind map include:
* It engages the visual part of your brain in understanding
and organizing information.
* The relationships between chunks of information are
explicitly stated.
* By mapping short phrases that represent larger chunks of
information a simple mind map allows easy recall of large
amounts of information.
A concrete example will make this clear. I created a simple
mind map to help me design this article. I started with the
words "mind mapping" in the center of a piece of paper.
Around that central theme I listed four topics, "benefits",
"information overload", "What is mind mapping?", and
"example". The fact that two of these topics are single
words, one a short phrase, and one a complete sentence is
irrelevant. What's important is that these topics mean
something to me.
I connected each of these topics to the central theme by
drawing a line between the two. This shows that the topic
and theme are directly related. I also drew a line
connecting the topics "benefits" and "information overload."
This reminded me that the topics were related, since I was
looking for mind mapping benefits relative to the subject of
information overload.
Next, I started developing each of the topics by adding
subtopics related to each particular topic, and linking
those subtopics to the main topic. For example, the
subtopics "once too little," and "now too much" are
connected to the topic "information overload." This allowed
me to keep track of the things that I wanted to say about
each of the main topics.
Given the length of this article, that's all I really needed
to do. In just two or three minutes I had a mind map of the
entire thing. Then all I had to do was write it. The map
made it easy to keep track of all the topics (information)
I wanted to cover in the article, and the links between them
made it easy to keep related chunks of information together.
The amount of information contained in this article is
relatively small. You could easily organize it in a
traditional outline form, or even keep it all sorted out in
your head. But as the amount of information grows,
traditional methods break down. Keep the information for a
course or a book in your head is a question, and even
traditional outlining becomes too clumsy.
Mind maps are easily expandable and engage your visual
memory, helping you to grasp and organize more material at
once. Give mind mapping a try the next time you need to
memorize or organize large amounts of information.
Resource Box
Bill Mann is a freelance technology writer who uses mind
mapping extensively in his day-to-day work. He is the
author of "How to Do Everything with Your Tablet PC,"
available now at http://tabletpc.techforyou.com, and "How to
Do Everything with Outlook 2003," coming this summer.