The blog

This tip is a con­tin­u­a­tion of last week’s post. In it, just as I will in this, I pro­mote the great struc­tur­al tool that the ​“mind-map” is, espe­cial­ly dig­i­tal ver­sions, that is, those made in one of the mind-map-soft­ware avail­able for pur­chase or down­load­ing free (also referred to as ​“open source”-software).

A mind-map is espe­cial­ly prac­ti­cal when you wish to gath­er a large quan­ti­ty of infor­ma­tion so that you eas­i­ly can find and access what you are look­ing for.

Anoth­er five

Last week I pre­sent­ed five out of ten uses for a mind-map. Here are the remain­ing five: 

1. Your per­son­al con­trol pan­el – Just as the pilot has numer­ous instru­ments in the cock­pit to assure he is main­tain­ing the cor­rect alti­tude, the right speed, and that the air­plane arrives safe­ly at the intend­ed des­ti­na­tion, you can have your own per­son­al instru­ment pan­el in the form of a mind-map. ??Cre­ate a mind-map with the fol­low­ing branches: 
   • Vision — what you wish to attain and accom­plish in the long-run, with your busi­ness or in your life
   • Goals – the goals, mile­stones and key-fig­ures which you esti­mate to be the short-term achieve­ments nec­es­sary in order to achieve the vision in the long-run 
   • To-do-tasks – Quite sim­ply every­thing you have to do, arranged in cat­e­gories by the con­text, that is, the cir­cum­stance or sit­u­a­tion you need to be in or the tools you need, to be able to per­form the task
   • Wait­ing for – all the mate­r­i­al or respons­es you are wait­ing for from others
   • Project — your projects, action-plans or larg­er ini­tia­tives which are in the process of com­ple­tion at the moment
   • Some­time, maybe – your bank of inge­nious ideas which need a lit­tle extra while to mature until the time is right to put them into action
2. Your prospects, ongo­ing sales-process­es and your clients – If you don’t have a so called CRM-sys­tem, a mind-map might do the trick for you. In a mind-map, cre­ate branch­es rep­re­sent­ing the var­i­ous phas­es of your sales-process. As sub-branch­es, write down your dream clients, prospects and cur­rent clients by the branch rep­re­sent­ing the phase in which you work on and com­mu­ni­cate with the clients. As your sales­work pro­gress­es, move the poten­tial clients from one branch to anoth­er until they arrive at the branch ​“Deal!”
3. Knowl­edge­bank – Cre­ate a bank of facts with all the knowl­edge you have in a par­tic­u­lar area. You can link to books, soft­ware, ser­vices and oth­er doc­u­ments. When a client pos­es a ques­tion, you can pro­vide an answer or link quick­ly so that the client can move on with what­ev­er they were doing and need­ed an answer for. ??For exam­ple, I have a sin­gle mind-map cov­er­ing all the phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal struc­tur­al tools I know of, as a knowl­edge­bank to use myself in my role as Struk­tör. (Nope, can’t for­ward it, but I’ll give you a nib­ble every week.)
4. All the ideas you’ve come to think of when you’ve got­ten start­ed with solv­ing a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem – A com­mon usage of a mind-map is when brain-storm­ing, com­ing up with new ideas and/​or solv­ing prob­lems. If you have a cer­tain prob­lem, fill a mind-map with all the pos­si­ble solu­tions and ideas you can think of with­out being judg­men­tal in terms of what is a good idea and what isn’t. When you have ​“emp­tied” your­self of ideas, and no soon­er, sort out the one/​ones you want to pro­ceed with and get to it!
5. Links to the hard dri­ve, to your ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al – You prob­a­bly have your hard dri­ve filled with doc­u­ments and files which are good to have at some point. Maybe you have even more mate­r­i­al on a shared serv­er in your orga­ni­za­tion. You tend to use some files more often than oth­ers, and it’s tempt­ing to cre­ate a short­cut on the desk­top linked to these.??But before you know it, the com­put­er desk­top is clut­tered with icons and short­cuts and even­tu­al­ly it again gets hard to find what you need. Cre­ate a dig­i­tal mind-map where you gath­er the links to all the doc­u­ments you open fre­quent­ly but make sure to group them in a struc­tured way. Allow the branch­es, to which you attach the links, to rep­re­sent for instance dif­fer­ent func­tions in your busi­ness; mar­ket, bud­get, sup­pli­ers, et c. 

Small­er, faster and eas­i­er to get an overview of

If you begin using the mind-map as a tool in your every­day life, you will need to remem­ber less, find the right doc­u­ment faster and you will in a clear­er and bet­ter way get an overview of where you are head­ing, how far you’ve got­ten and where you are today.

How do you do it?

What’s your way of mak­ing sure you quick­ly find the files you are look­ing for when you need them? 

Please com­ment below.