I am not sure if you can share or not for confidential reasons but I have never really wrapped my hands around mind mapping and how to use it. Is there any sample or idea you could share to see what was done? Either on the forum or privately? If not I completely understand I am just very much intrigued by it but have never seen one or understood how to go about it.
You can find a lot of mindmaps on the web that can help you. All my own mindmaps are in French, so maybe not the best to share on an english forum. Just search for mindmap in google image and you will find lot of examples.
The key concepts are :
- The center node contain the question or the subject of the map.
- You read it clockwise starting at top right.
- Each node can have children.
- Each node represents a concept. His children are child concepts.
Why it is more efficient than traditionnal vertical note taking ?
- Organizing concept in hierarchy help you to take an easy overview of all ideas.
- This way of represent ideas (grouping and connecting) is really close to the way your mind works so it really help you to understand complex or huge concepts.
- With a mindmap software, you can open and close branches and zoom. So you can easily dig into huge mindmaps.
In wich case am I using mindmap :
- Everytime I have to understand something complex with multiple concepts.
- Take notes during meeting. (with the appropriate software, it's faster than writing by and and allow to organize or reorganize in live.)
- To drive a brainstorming in live during meeting. (displaying the mindmap in live on a screen, everybody can see all ideas organized in live giving to everyone at same time all ideas and a good overview and synthesis at the same time.)
- To sort and summarize the key concepts of a book that I read.
- To prepare the plan of a course, an article or any other type of content I create.
- To make a project plan or calculate a quotation on a projet. (freeplane have some math fonctionnalities. If you add for example a price on a node. It can give you the sum on the parent node.)
- To find ideas about anything. (brand name, ...)
- Making a shopping list (one parent node for each shop area) it greatly help to not forget anything when you write it then to be efficient in the shop.
- To store all my knowledge. (using Obsidian wich produce a sort of huge mindmap of all notes I've taken)
Wich software ?
- Freeplane : hugly but extremely fast because you can use it wich only keyboard knowing only few shortcuts.
- Obsidian : for knowledge management only.