Are you looking for a way to plan your life? Whether it be goals, plans or just general day-to-day activities. Have you considered trying mind mapping? No, mind mapping is not some brain scan that your doctor uses. Mind mapping is simply a way to visualize your creative planning phases. It involves not only creativity and thinking, but also problem solving.
Basically, you start with a single idea or theme and branch out from there, adding topics and sub-topics that are in someway related to that idea. It actually works very similarly to the way the brain does function, thus why it is called mind mapping.
And of course, this process can be made easier through the use of a software package. One such package available is called FreeMind, a free, Open Source program available under the GNU General Public license. It is available on several different platforms so it is available to many users.
This award-winning program will allow you to create and edit a graphical view of your concept or idea. It approaches the idea process in a non-linear, creative approach. It allows users to approach traditional brainstorming from different angles — a sort of “thinking outside the box” approach.
Some features that FreeMind provides include:
-Ability to save files to XML
-Folding branches
-Ability to place clouds around branches
-Nodes can have individual icons
-Hyper linking from nodes to web pages and files
-FreeMind for the web can utilize Flash or Java
-Document export to OpenDocument or PDF for easy sharing
-FreeMind documents can be exported to XHTML as well as HTML
-Graphical linking
So the next time you need to be creative in your planning of ideas and goals, try using FreeMind and you might just find yourself much more successful because you were “thinking out side the box!”
