

Ask YC: Does anyone get any value from mind mapping? - adsyoung

I've dismissed mind mapping as a fairly pointless excercise having tried it on several occasions and found it to be not much more use than a fairly messy way to organise your ideas. The thing is, I keep stumbling into people and books who swear by it and sing all sorts of praises. I'm interested, does it not suit certain types of people or am I missing something here? Do you guys find it to be useful and if so would you mind sharing how?
Cheers
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paulsb
To be honest, I was very sceptical of them at first as well; however, now I
have my mind mapping software load at start-up - that is how much I need it. I
put everything related to my ideas in it: links, notes, images, videos, pdf's,
etc. One thing that you have to be careful of is that the maps for ideas can
quickly grow to become huge, and I have now found it more beneficial to split
large maps into smaller ones and just link through to them. They are also
really useful if you have more than one idea on the go. Good software will
allow you to set-up different styles too; this can be useful for simple flow
diagrams.

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JayNeely
Mindmaps have been an invaluable tool for me to organize my thoughts. They're
less restrictive than simple down-the-page tree hierarchy notes, more
understandable at a glance, and keep ideas connected. They've been most useful
when I've been trying to grasp really big ideas that take multiple lines of
thought.

It's not a tool for providing fully-detailed notes. They've been most useful
for helping people who already _know_ the subject matter better _understand_
it.

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Kaizyn
Personally, I find the idea of concept mapping to be much more 'useful' than
mind mapping as I don't like having 1 big idea stuck in the middle of a map.
However, to organize your thoughts in a not strictly linear format, there are
worse ways than mind maps.

Also, having the ability to expand/collapse branches of the tree make it
fairly useful for organization of projects or for GTD systems. This is not
something easily mimicked with other note taking/text tools.

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Hexstream
"The thing is, I keep stumbling into people and books who swear by it and sing
all sorts of praises."

Religious people do that do but they don't impress me.

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iamdave
For what it's worth, I see it as nothing more than an outline that pines to be
a spider chart. It's foolish to say one form of personal organization is
better than another if your aim is to convince other people of the same thing.
Do whatever works for you.

In my case, so long as I have things written down, I'm good.

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JulianMorrison
I use it for brainstorming. It allows me to effectively operate in both
"sparking off lots of quickly-forgotten ideas" and in "elaborating in depth"
mode.

