…SO I decided to use *mind mapping* to put it ALL into perspective…and BOY has it…I actually printed my complete on-line business onto 26 A4 pages to overview it SO I could break it down further into a start to finish model!

It completed filled my dining table…BUT the point I am trying to make is…when I just looked at it…man it ALL just fell into place with ONE LOOK!

Extremely powerful I was blown away!

Awesome post….I recently have spent countless hours building my business plans in the form of a mind map…they’re extremely powerful as a *brain dumping* tool you can use them as a kind og mental external hard drive!

I have found that this gives you room and leverage to actually start to take action on your goals and plans…because you NOW have a freed up your thoughts…to break it ALL down and attack your mind map as a *step by step* plan…excellent post!

Thanks for sharing your process for product planning and coming up with new ideas.

I use Mindjet Mind Manager it has a few cool feature that FreeMind doesn’t have but they both get the job done.

I’ve downloaded a couple to see how you plan and structure your ideas, thanks for the tips John

Danny

Mindmaps are a great tool but as you rightly point out they are no miracle cure, you still need to create structure to your mindmaps which you illustrate really well in all of the mindmaps you share during this post.

The mindmap serves as a great project checkpoint, as you should never begin the build phase until you are clear on what you are building, a mistake I repeat all too often!

thanks again, igor Griffiths

I switched onto mindmaps in the 70’s/80’s when Tony Buzan presented series of TV programmes on UK television. They’ve since served me well throught out my career.

I’m now lecturing postgrads and would like to use your mindmaps if that’s OK?

I also lecture on Project Management in Marketing (PMiM) where mindmaps are one of the tools I recommend before preparing the work breakdown schedule etc. Have you published any other articles that connect with PMiM? Please advise if you have.
Best regards,
Terry

After first identifying the features one has to go onto sorting out the sequence of completion (order of precedence) and what can or cannot be actionned in parallel. Only then can a crtical path analysis be undertaken.

Both tools have the considerable benefit of providing an easily accessible visual representation (at least as compared with a text version) but aren’t the same and don’t do the same job.

Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Terry

Been a fan of them for more years than I care to remember now! For those that love their lists, fair enough, each to their own, I used to be a list man myself back in the 90’s but it’s a fact that the human brain thinks in images, not lines of text.

Try it, think of something random, an elephant….does a big block of text in 72pt Verdana come flying into your mind? No, most likely it’s an image of an elephant. For the real creatives, I’ve even seen mindmaps without a single word of text on them, the images did all the talking to the person who created it. It was a work of art!

That’s not for everyone coz it must take up a lot of time making them all visual and pretty like that and for the busy marketer, we want to save time, not waste it and the thing is, your brain makes several connections to a piece of information normally not just the one you have with a list.

That’s where mind maps excel as you can link several maps or nodes together and that knocks plain old lists of text into a cocked hat. You’d have scribbled lines all over the shop if you did it that way and it’s good to see so many marketers catching on to their usefulness and including them in their products. It really does help to figure out some quite complicated processes.

Chris

Mind mapping is a concept that I have just begun to use, by putting my thoughts down in a Mind Map allows me to more clearly define the concept all the way through to its execution. I have started to use it a work as well.

Thanks,

Michael Orth