{"id":539,"date":"2018-03-12T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/?p=539"},"modified":"2018-03-11T19:27:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-11T23:27:41","slug":"getting-organized-in-2018-mindmanager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/blog\/2018\/03\/12\/getting-organized-in-2018-mindmanager\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting organized in 2018 – Mindmanager"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series<\/a><\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve been following this series you know that the tools I use most frequently are: pen and paper<\/a>,1<\/a><\/sup> OmniFocus<\/a>,2<\/a><\/sup> Evernote<\/a>,3<\/a><\/sup>, Dropbox<\/a>, and Ulysses<\/a>. Those are the tools I\u2019d be lost without. Last week I introduced a tool that I could live without, but that I find very handy, Scrivener<\/a>. This week I\u2019ll briefly describe another tool I find handy. It\u2019s one that I could live without more easily than Scrivener, but it still comes in handy. It\u2019s a mind-mapping tool called MindManager<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like Scrivener, MindManager is available for both Mac and Windoze. Unlike Scrivener, the features available in the Windoze version seem to be much more advanced and flexible.4<\/a><\/sup>Although the Mindjet site5<\/a><\/sup> promises that you\u2019ll find MindManager useful for brainstorming, visualizing data, flowcharts, and project management, I\u2019ve only used it for brainstorming. For that it is very useful.<\/p>\n

I am lousy at visual thinking, but I\u2019m trying to get better, and mapping out concepts in a concept map is an easy way for someone like me who thinks very verbally to start making my ideas more visual. I\u2019ve discovered that making my thoughts visual – admittedly just a pretty outline – makes it easier for other people to understand them. But it is more than just a pretty outline. It\u2019s easy to move pieces of a map around. It\u2019s easy to promote or demote them in a hierarchy, and I often find that after I\u2019ve played with a map for a while, new ideas are occurring to me that wouldn\u2019t have popped into my brain if I\u2019d been trying the same thing in a Word outline or outline mode in Emacs.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not familiar with mind mapping, visit mindmapping.com<\/a> and look around. If you want to see an example of how I\u2019ve used it, take a look at this mind map<\/a> derived from a 2013 meeting of the Dimensions of Biodiversity team working on Protea<\/em> and Pelargonium<\/em> in South Africa. It\u2019s written in HTML 5 and directly exported from MindManager.<\/p>\n

Click on the little bubbles with numbers, and you\u2019ll see details pop out. Click on the little circles with \u201c-\u201c, and you\u2019ll see the details collapse. The version you\u2019re looking at is read-only, so you can\u2019t change the text or the structure. You can either imagine what it\u2019s like to drag any piece of this map anywhere else, add anything you like at any lever, or delete anything you don\u2019t want, or<\/strong><\/em> you can get a trial version of MindManager and try it out yourself.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re interested in mind mapping, you owe it to yourself to spend a little time investigating the links you’ll find from a Google search. There are free mind mapping tools available, and there’s a good chance they’ll be plenty to satisfy your needs. I use MindManager (a) because I started with it years ago and (b) I like the export options (PDF and <\/em><\/strong>HTML 5), but your mileage may vary.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. More details here<\/a> and here<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. More on how I use OmniFocus here<\/a>. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. More on Evernote here<\/a> and here<\/a>. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. I say \u201cseem to be\u201d because I\u2019m going on what the product descriptions say. I haven\u2019t used MindManager on Windoze in so long I can\u2019t claim to have any direct experience with it. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Mindjet is the corporation that produces MindManager ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. I haven\u2019t tried OmniOutliner from the folks who produce OmniFocus. It\u2019s possible that I\u2019d get the same advantage from using that. Maybe it\u2019s just the ease of manipulating the objects in an electronic form that makes MindManager work for me. But I do think it\u2019s more than that. Even for someone as non-visual as I am, somehow seeing the relationships makes them clearer. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series If you\u2019ve been following this series you know that the tools I use most frequently are: pen and paper,1 OmniFocus,2 Evernote,3,… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}