How to Make Mind Maps

Why should I use Mind Maps?

Mind Mapping frees your thoughts from the artificial linear thinking you have probably been taught from childhood.

Mind Maps give a visual representation of your thoughts, and are useful for brainstorming, memorization, problem solving, presentations, project planning and many other uses.

They are so effective because they work the way you think, breaking down the information into understandable chunks which are linked together into a well organized structure. This mirrors the arrangement of the neurons in your brain, and the way you think of ideas and remember information.

How are Mind Maps organized?

At the centre of the Mind Map is the title. This can be a single word, a few words, an image, or any combination of these.

Radiating from the centre are the main branches or "Basic Ordering Ideas" also known as BOIs. These represent the main concepts of the Mind Map.

These have children branches as many levels deep as required to represent the information.

Use colours and images helps to make the Mind Map more memorable.

Creating Your Mind Map

After choosing the font, colours and images for the Mind Map title, add the first level branches. If your Mind Mapping program supports "rainbow coloring", you can use this to automatically colour the branches. If not, it is still a good idea to manually put the colour in either as you go, or after you have got the information in and want to pretty the Mind Map up.

It is best to use single words on the branched, or sometimes two or three. This is because your brain is good at making new associations when it is presented with an abstract idea like a single word. This leads you down new ways of thinking so that you come up with new ideas and new solutions. At first this may seem a little strange, especially if you were brought up with linear thinking and note taking. It is definitely worth the effort to learn to work in this way. People I have taught this to in the past have told me that it is like a light going on in their head, where both left brain (logical thinking) and right brain (creative, artistic) are fully engaged.

The Chicken or the Egg?

Occasionally you may find a situation where you don't know which should be the parent branch and which one should be the child.

The easiest way around this is to look and see which has the most children (or potential children). Use that as the parent branch, as it is a more important idea. This almost always resolves the problem.

Help! I ran out of ideas!

Occasionally you may be working on something, and suddenly the ideas just seem to dry up. This usually happens when there is a deadline approaching and you start panicking.

Luckily with Mind Mapping this need not hold you back. Here are three approaches which will almost always resolve the issue:

Make some branches with no text on them. Your brain will start wanting to put text on the branches to avoid the feeling of incompleteness.
If you are using the NovaMind Suggesterator, use it to add some suitable child branches and continue from there.
Go and do something else - preferably something that takes you away from your computer and gets the blood flowing and some more oxygen to your brain.

What if I get it wrong?

Don't panic! While there are some map layouts which are easier to read, understand, and memorize than others, there is no "right" or "wrong" in Mind Mapping.

If you find that you would like to rearrange the Mind Map, just graft the branches into a different place on the Mind Map.

Speeding up the process

You should be able to add branches quickly in your Mind Mapping program just by using a hotkey.

If your program has BranchStorm capability, you can turn that on and just enter the branch text for a child branch, then press Enter (or Return) after each branch worth of text, and the child branches will be created using that text as the title of the branch.

Just create the branches in any order, not worrying too much about the structure of the Mind Map, then go back later and graft the branches and make it look pretty.

Useful Methodologies

Many people have a tendency to stay on one parent idea and add many many child branches. This is called "blooming".

Other people naturally start with a parent and create a chain of linkages through each child. This is called "flowing".

It is best to maintain a balance between these two approaches - sometimes do a bit of blooming, and sometimes a bit of flowing. This keeps you from falling back into linear thinking and missing out on the organic growth of the Mind Map.