Introduction To Mind Mapping And GTD

January 28th 2007

While mind mapping has had some mention in relation to GTD I have never really used it before, apart from the occasional doodle in my notepad or when I was studying at school/university (even then more on the behest of the teacher). However I have just come across Bubbl.us via LifeDev and I am very interested by it because of its simplicity and ease of use. You don’t even have to register and log in to try it, which is always a bonus in terms of actually bothering to use something in the first place. While it’s early days I am keen to incorporate mind mapping into my workflow and I’ve detailed some ways of doing exactly that below.

Brainstorming
This is the most obvious one that everyone tends to be aware of and is how I used mind maps at school. Put the topic you want to brainstorm in the center bubble and let the train of thought run from there.
Pre-planning
A great example of this is how I used Bubbl.us to plan out this post. I wrote mind mapping in the first bubble and just went from there, like brainstorming but with a purpose. The four points in this post were each a set of bubbles and I had another bubble for working out the post name.
Note taking
Rather than have a mass of unrelated notes covering sheets of paper, arrange them into some sort of order, like in a mind map structure, so that each point has some relation to other points.
Organizing your tasks
Combining mind mapping with your next actions list as discussed at David Allen’s website is the most appealing approach to me. Have branches coming from the center bubble to represent each context (@phone, @computer, etc) and then each project branches out from there.

I would be very interested to know what you all think of mind mapping in relation to GTD, how you use it, if you even use it at all and if you have any suggestions for other good mind mapping software. Please leave a comment!

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my RSS feed for easy access to the latest content. If you prefer, you can also subscribe by email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox. More info on RSS can be found here.