Mind Manager
Sunday, October 18, 2009
- http://www.mindjet.com/products/mindmanager-8-win/overview
- This product has been around for several years now.
- I’m very satisfied with how quickly I’m getting up to speed reading “Mind Manager for Dummies” on my tablet/eReader.
- The book helps understand the serious potential these Mind Mapping tools have for pulling together all the different types of material we try to mange ourselves with these days… web pages, PDF’s, docs, eMails, project plans, diagrams, etc. etc.
- The book also made me realize that the UI actually operates on a few very simple choices available to getting started beyond staring at a blank page
- I really like the “brainstorm mode” where you work with a single edit box and the enter key. You get to stay in heads down brain dump mode as fast as you can spew out ideas, the tool throws each phrase out on the diagram as a box and then when you’ve emptied out, you go back and connect all the boxes… it’s a pretty neat feeling.
- It is very liberating to have a tool make the jumble in your head look this “pretty” so quickly.
- You can cut and paste ANYTHING from the Windows landscape into your diagram to be a “box” that can be related to other boxes… I have been using Outlook & OneNote messages as my rudimentary “idea gathering notepad” but the automatic graphical layout of Mind Manager feels much more expressive even for a very non-right brain guy like me… it’s sorta like being able to relationally diagram everything you’re trying to think about
- There are tons of templates on the mind manager web site that give an idea of what it can be used for… meeting notes, project planning, requirements gathering, balanced score card, status report, presentations, brainstorming sessions, etc.
- It’s quite capable at exporting into more traditional formats like PowerPoint & HTML to share with others… it will readily “flatten” out the visual hierarchy into a text only MSWord outline document.
- MindJet also has a “Catalyst” product which claims to be an online collaboration environment enabling Mind Mapping in groups… I haven’t tried this yet but it makes a ton of sense at face value… makes me immediately wonder about mashing this with Google Wave.
- As they say, a picture is worth 1000 words…
- ok yes this is admittedly very trivial content but that’s actually one point of benefit… namely, flushing the trivial things out of the preciously limited forefront of your head so you can get on to bigger and better things
