I have a graphic designer friend who was toying around with a logo for Dreaming Right. In the process of giving him feed back about his beautiful logo design, I realized something about my mission for this project:

I want readers to get clear, warm, and simple information about how to live better. I want them to feel that it is a friend…a kind of goofy, kind of nerdy, flawed but authentic friend is passing them advice that they can take or leave.

The nerdy part refers to my desire to be “literary”, to explain my reasoning, rather than to post links or lists. I guess you could say that I am a writing nerd. A fan-boy of the essay.

But another part of me is feeling frustration that all the tidbits of good information that flow over me are not being passed on. I take too much time tweaking my little essays, and with my current job, it seems like I only have the time, energy and attention span for one post a week.

Maybe I should write short posts. Maybe I should just post short synopses and links to useful life advice like Bruce Barber @ The Real-Life Survival Guide.

I want to share, but not indiscriminately.

I have been avoiding the short post and link-heavy content because of my literary pretensions, but also because I feel like the bite-sized chunks of information might be doing something detrimental to us. The internet may be changing our brains.

As Nicholas Carr says in an article in last summer’s The Atlantic:

…the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

His essay, which took all of my concentration to read even though it was totally interesting and well written, was about how our brains might be losing something that those of us who once read deeply and patiently recognize as valuable.

Nevertheless, short posts are more efficient…and more likely to be read.

• Step 1: think about it, dream about it, talk about it
• Step 2: make a mind-map about it.
• Step 2.1: get distracted looking at mind-map web applications
• Step 2.2: write an article about getting distracted

Me and Mind Maps

I got into mind maps a couple years ago. I started out by reading The Mind Map Book by Tony Buzan, the slightly annoying man who attempted to trademark the word “Mind Map” and is often given credit as being the inventor. Despite being annoyed by the constant capitalization (of the letters and on the idea) of Mind Map, I found the book to be incredibly useful. I followed advice which suggested that I adhere to a particular set of “Mind Map Laws” until I had made 100 maps. I’ve drawn about 300 or so, written an article about them and given several workshops on the topic.

“Mind map” can mean a lot of things, but it usually refers to a visual representation of ideas, concepts, or facts that uses color and makes connections that radiate out from the center. Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm and to organize thoughts about a project, idea, or piece of writing that is in its early phases. As a writing tutor, I’ve used mind maps to help visual and kinesthetic learners to organize their ideas into coherent papers. This is all to say – I love mind maps and I use them often.

3 Free Mind-Map Web Apps

• Bubbl.us has a very simple interface, which is important because you don’t want to stifle your creative flow by having to a lot of left-brain figuring-out-of-complicated-stuff. This is a mind-map I made for a presentation I was going to do at a tutoring conference. It may take a little while to load, but when it does you can zoom in and out and scroll around
• Text 2 Mind Map – was the first place I Stumbled Upon. This is a really cool app that takes regular text and creates one of those floaty, rubber-bandy, self-adjusting mind-maps. By using tabs in the text, you create “child” nodes that are farther out from the center. Unfortunately, it couldn’t handle my entire brainstorm and didn’t read all the tabs exactly right. Still, I love that my ideas were floating around, nervously bouncing off each other.
• Mindmeister – seemed to be a much more powerful application that offers several levels of membership above the free sign-up. I hope they are still working on it, because all in all, it is a good compromise between the all important simple interface and extended functionality. I use a slow computer and a slow DSL connection, so it was a bit frustrating when I uploaded the text that I had originally used with Text 2 Mind Map. Still, the fact that I could upload text and convert it to a mind map is awesome.

What I Learned

I did very little new thinking about building my website while clicking around looking for a way to mind-map online. The internet is for gathering new information and it is too tempting to click around, trying out new features. Even if using a particular webapp became second nature, every time I used it, I would be thrown into a temptation rich environment. As Timothy Ferriss might put it, I would be thrown off my information diet.

For me, mindmapping is about making new connections between ideas and information you already have. The big idea that results is a new idea, but not new information. It is an amalgamation of information that you have already gathered.

So, sitting at a table with a blank piece pf paper and some colored pencils is where creative organization is going to happen for me. I won’t stop checking out the mind map apps though.

More Mind Map Resources on the Web

While stumbling around, I came across a few cool sites, and some disappointing ones. Don’t go to Wikipedia to find a list of mind map apps. It is ridiculously short. On the other hand, mind-mapping.org has a huge database of mind mapping software. A great free application that you have to download and install is the open-source Freemind. I’ve used it a lot.

Another resource, a little closer to home, is my article on how to use mind maps to improve your writing.