The top-down approach, as recommended in Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, is great for laying out a path towards your long term vision. However it’s often difficult to reconcile that path with your current situation. The focus is so much on your aspirations and dreams. Trying to turn such visions into actionable, here-and-now goals that you will get you towards them is not easy.

The bottom-down approach, with it’s initial focus on what you are doing in the short term, suffers from the reverse. The focus is on what you’re doing now and inevitably leads to your long term vision being stunted by impracticalities and pessimism that may exist in your life. It’s difficult to align the short term with the bigger picture.

If you have used either of these approaches in your planning, whether it be with a GTD vertical map, Seven Habits mission statements or something else entirely please share your experiences in the comments. I have detailed the basic disadvantages but there are plenty of benefits too.

There is one other approach that I’m currently trying that to my knowledge hasn’t been covered in any depth. Instead of starting from the top or bottom, how about beginning from the middle? I suggest reading my three stage guide to mapping out your life to understand the basics beforehand. Start from your medium term goals which when achieved will result in big positive steps in your life but which are still practical and achievable (examples include getting a promotion, getting married and getting the grades to go university). How do these align with where you want to be in life? If you have a goal of getting promoted in the next several years, where do you ultimately want to end up? As a member of the board? With your own company? Or do you just simply want to be a success in whatever you do?

If there is correlation, what next actions and projects can you then define for those goals? For instance, one of my current aims is to get a new house. I want to do that because my vision of ultimately having a great family home. With all that in mind I can then plan out various short term projects such as decorating and improving my current property and putting money aside for it all.

Mind mapping
I’ve tried mind mapping in the past to make myself more productive, but it’s never worked. Mind mapping is great for brainstorming and jotting down ideas but for me that is all it’s good for. One person suggested using the approach to plan out your week instead of having lists. In theory it sounded a great idea, because you are able to draw lines and connection between different elements. I could visually identify the correlations between a next action bubble and its related project bubble and then onto what role it fits into and so on. Unfortunately that turned out to be both unnecessary and complicated. We don’t need to draw lines between everything to understand how they all relate. If you are a busy person with lots of projects you just end up with a huge spider’s web of confusion.

80/20 Rule
I actually like this rule, though I do agree with Lifehack.org somewhat that it is a generalized idea, wrapped around some unscientific formula. For example, I doubt I really have exactly 20% of my clothes that I wear 80% of the time. However if we don’t take the idea at face value it’s actually very useful. Most people will have a small selection of clothes that they really do wear most of their time, or do the same set of projects that take up most of your time. When it comes to streamlining or simplifying your processes that is useful knowledge.

The power of Brand You
How exactly does this influence your productivity? To me this seems to be more involved with personal development and self-help. Can it really be good for you to brand yourself according to what people want? It’s a shame that nowadays your image to others seems more important than the work you actually do. I remember a friend telling me of his experiences with this issue at his previous job. He was one of the hardest, most productive people there but because he was not comfortable being false to himself and putting on a fake public image the company wanted his efforts were ignored.

Making productivity a habit
I disagree with this point. Work out what makes specific approaches and systems make your more productive and stick with them till it becomes a habit. As you become more practised in being productive, you spend less time thinking about it and more time actually being productive. How is that a bad thing? The article does argue that when practices become habits you can get slack and miss things because you are not consciously thinking about the issues anymore but that’s the same for everything in life, are we to change all your productivity systems every month to stop us becoming too comfortable with it?

Visualizing success
This is worryingly close to the new age advice that I’ve questioned a lot in my self-help myths series. Ok, you have to write a presentation at the next meeting so you’ve imagined yourself making a killer speech and you are now feeling pumped up. Then what? You still need to put in the work, you havn’t magically gained some energy that will automatically translate into a great presentation. It’s not just about visualizing what a great presentation is, it’s also visualizing how you do it. Golf players don’t just visualize themselves potting the ball, they visualize all the steps in between from the first swing to getting on the green. Then they put the practice in.

While I was researching about mind mapping I recently came across a blog dedicated to the topic. Of particular interest was a detailed chart comparing the main web-based mind mapping tools out there (two of which – Mindomo and bubbl.us – I have covered in the past). The chart goes into much more depth than I would ever want, though if you are interested in mind mapping and want to take it further I suggest you check it out. It’s interesting to note how much more feature rich Mindomo is. However, as I have discussed previously, this isn’t necessarily an advantage unless you are wanting to create very attractive layouts. That’s useful for presentations but for personal use? An effective productivity system has to be quick. If you spend half your time tweaking the layout of your next actions mind map then the system will fail on you.

The obvious thing about Mindomo compared to bubbl.us is that it is much more complex. This is both good and bad and I really can’t quite decide which way to go with it. Mindomo allows a lot of control over the looks of the mind map, including being able to choose font options, edit the bubbles, their shapes and colors, add hyperlinks and images… the list goes on. This allows you to create a mind map that is attractive and exactly how you want it.

However is this necessarily a good thing? With bubbl.us there is no real choice over the looks so I don’t have to worry about it. I can just sit down, type what I want, press enter for a new bubble and basically have the map created in a few minutes. With Mindomo I have to avoid the temptation to tweak and experiment with the looks (and you will probably want to tweak it as the default options are not the most appealing). That’s great if it’s part of some presentation or for display, but from my personal experience of mind mapping, I’ve only ever used them for brainstorming and rough note taking purposes and so I’d rather not waste time on the looks. Out of curiosity, in what context do you have to create mind maps. Is it for rough planning/brainstorming or for work/meetings? Leave a comment!

Anyways, Mindomo is good enough to have some ready made mind maps up for you to check out, which really showcase the power of the tool. I have to admit bubbl.us wouldn’t be able to create something like that.

• 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!