I am a great advocate of mind mapping. I’ve utilising mind maps since I was a teenager at school when I was taking notes in class. If you are not sure what mind mapping is then find out more on the Wikipedia. Essentially mind mapping is a non-linear way of organising information that more closely resembles the way your brain stores data and makes associations between units of data. Working with information externally (outside your brain) in a way that is similar to how your brains works with that data internally has a lot of benefits.
For the last few years I have been using an excellent mind mapping application called MindManager. It costs a couple of hundred US$, so it ain’t cheap. It also won’t run on Linux and Mindjet (the developer of MindManager) indicated to me they have no intention of porting it over to Linux.
Now there is another option… free and with cross-platform support.
Freemind
“FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations. So you want to write a completely new metaphysics? Why don’t you use FreeMind? You have a tool at hand that remarkably resembles the tray slips of Robert Pirsig, described in his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila. Do you want to refactor your essays in a similar way you would refactor software? Or do you want to keep personal knowledge base, which is easy to manage? Why don’t you try FreeMind? Do you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you’ve been and where you are heading, as Stephen Covey would advise you? Have you tried FreeMind to keep track of all the things that are needed for that?”
Main Page - FreeMind - free mind mapping software
Cross compatability?
MindManager is able to import mind maps made with Freemind. There is an add-on freely available here on the MindJet site.
Freemind also has some capability to import and export MindManager maps. More info can be found here.
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