I know that people use Excel seriously, as an essential tool of their work. In the realm of notes I seriously (day in and day out, lotsa notes) use Notepad, and it seems sufficient for my needs so far. The inventor of the wiki used wiki for notes, so presumably he had a lot more notes to deal with than I do.
So how many people out there seriously use mind mapping software? Not as a toy for the first 3 days after reading some “10 step program to become happy through mind mapping” book but as something that is a part of their daily work or study?
Is there even a credible way to find this out in the first place?
Not familiar with it. Can you give a brief explanation as to what the software does to improve the mapping process? The idea makes sense.
Just from an organizational POV I try to group tools together so I can find them. Example, I group drill bits, screw bits, drivers, driver handles, chuck keys, socket adapters, nut drivers, and cutting disks together in a kit for my drills.
Magiver, the software in question allegedly helps people to visually organize relationships between some sorts of info. That’s about all I can tell from scattered online info. So it belongs to the general class of note taking related software, I guess. Never used it myself and some of the talk about it sounds, well, cultish.
I don’t myself and don’t know anybody personally who does, but there’s definitely adherants out there because I always see posts on various tech forums of folks discussing their mindmapping solutions.
I don’t have to generate many notes on a day to day basis, so it’s never been relevant to me. When I return to school in the next few months, I intend to take a mindmap approach to notetaking (because my experience with “normal” notetaking as an undergrad was awful).
As for the software itself, the point is generally to make mind map diagrams easily. It’s not that there’s huge tricks to making the maps, it’s just that using software not designed for it will either be slow or disorganized.
Sure, people use mind maps seriously. I think it would be as hard or harder to find out how many people use mind maps as it would be to find out how many use an ABC priority system or how many use Cornell-style note taking. It’s just a tool, and not even a proprietary one (for example you could get a rough baseline of how many people use David Allen’s Getting Things Done system by seeing how many books he’s sold and how many conference attendees he has – not so with mind mapping).
One cross-platform open-source freeware mind mapping program, if people want to try it out, is Freemind: Main Page - FreeMind
Some things work better for me when I can see the branching and relationships. For example, I’ve mind-mapped areas of responsibility at my job – “top level” responsibilities, and how those break down into various project areas, and how those break down into individual actions, for example.
One advantage of using software over pen and paper is the same as using a word processor over pen and paper: ease of reorganization. You can move nodes around, you can easily add a node and the others can readjust to give it adequate room, and so on. Another is formatting (format top-level nodes as titles, lower levels differently, etc.).
I use mind maps a lot, and have been doing so since before I knew they were called mind maps, or knew anyone else used the technique (a bit disappointed when I discovered I hadn’t invented it first). I use them at work (especially for initial scoping of projects) and at home as a planning tool, or as a way of capturing notes as I go, when I’m developing a recipe or other idea
I rarely use software to create mind maps, however, as for me, they are a tool for capturing the shape of a concept as quickly and naturally as possible. I might occasionally use a distilld and sanitised version of a mind map in PowePoint, if I’m presenting a concept to people for the first time.
A few of my colleagues use them, and I know that some people with various kinds of learning difficulties/cognitive problems/dyslexia use them in software form, to help organise their thinking.
I have seen or heard of mind mapping software used regularly in two areas. Firstly, police work (although I have only been told this, so it’s a second hand anecdote), establishing lines of enquiry, relationships between individuals, etc, during investigations. Secondly, and similarly, I’ve used it on forensic accounting projects, to map out relationships between people, places, accounts, and the like.
That said, I’ve never used it, or seen it used, in any other business context.
I use mind maps extensively, but only on paper. The notes are for my own benefit or if I’m working on a project with people and I only use them as an intern process and not as a final result.
I don’t see how to count the number of people who use them.
Don’t know if you’re interested in another anecdote, but I had one client swear by the software. He listened to a series of focus groups we were doing and prepared his mindmaps in real time. He showed them to me, and I definitely saw the value, and thought it really did a good job of organizing the big picture. I was so impressed I took the step of downloading the demo . . . and then of course never tried it out! FWIW.
ok, I have just realized that there is a particular form of mind map that just doesn’t go by that name - the cause and effect chain, which undoubtedly useful for some things.
I wonder if people who sell mind mapping software should rename it as CAE chain software to get rid of the cultish pop-culture associations.
This is literally the first time I’ve ever heard of “cultish pop-culture associations” with mind maps. I think you have a solution looking for a problem.
You sound very close-minded in this thread, after several people telling you they use mind maps, saying there’s a “particular” form that’s useful for “some things”.
Mind maps are a form of notetaking. That’s all. If you find Notepad adequate for your needs, I suggest you’re probably not in the target audience for mind maps. Just as the guy who watches an hour of TV a week might find it ridiculous that people spend thousands of dollars on huge TVs, or people who haven’t played a video game since the Atari would consider a Wii or Kinect a horrendous waste of money.
Concur. Not really understanding the OP’s apparent need for people not to use mind maps, if that’s what they want. People think in different ways from each other, and choose to organise their thoughts in different styles when committing them to paper (or document).
For some people, that means mind maps - and it doesn’t really matter whether they worked it out for themselves, or were taught it, and liked it. If it works, what’s the problem?
Anyway - I just thought of one person who uses mind maps seriously (amongst a great many other tools, related and different; Edward De Bono - not that I suspect it matters.
Garfield226, why the personal attack? I did not start this thread to bash on mind maps but to explore their use. I am not sure if CAE has already been explicitly mentioned here, and well, here I mention it.
Maybe I am wrong about cultish undertones. I believe that some people who have claimed using them to alleged great benefit may have been cutlish Human Potential movement folks, or cultish college profs who draw diagrams aggregating anecdotes from students to illustrate the pervasive X in Y-an Z and similar (at least, that’s the smart cultish profs - the dumb ones can just list the whole BS in single column format). But maybe the great majority of users are not cultish and there is no such pop culture association.
There is certainly no doubt in my mind about the power of visual representations of CAE chains. If anything, I think that the world needs more and better tools for just this purpose.
Mind maps can be used to organise more than cause and effect - they’re particularly good for any kind of hierarchical or object-oriented data - and because they can be as free-form as needed, they can record different classes of hierarchies, dependencies, causes, effects, components and collections etc, all in the same diagram.
I’m pointing out that when several people tell you they either use, intend to use, or have seen mind mapping techniques used with positive effects, coming back with, “well, ok, this one form might be useful for some things, but man they should really call it something else because it sounds like a cult” seems a little insulting.
You went from saying some of the talk around mind maps sounds cultish to saying people should rename their software (inaccurately, too) to “get rid of the cultish…associations”. That’s a bit of a leap, don’t you think?
Some of the talk surrounding mind maps is cultish, I have no doubt. Some of the talk about self-help is cultish. Some of the talk around productivity is cultish. Some of the talk around religion is cultish. Some of the talk around education is cultish. Some of the talk around nutrition is cultish. Some of the talk around exercise is cultish. Some of the talk around investing is cultish.
See where I’m going?
Mind maps are a form of note-taking. They don’t have magical properties. They won’t solve your problems for you. They help organize thoughts in a way that’s different from writing prose or a bulleted list, which is more useful for some things for some people.
Your question in the OP was “how many people use mind maps seriously”, which is likely unanswerable, as several people have said. Do you have other questions about mind maps?
I grabbed a free little Mac app called MindNode awhile back, and I’ve been using it personally for rough outlines of short fiction and professionally to outline stub pages for a wiki overhaul.
I don’t currently, but in the past I have seriously used some “alternative” methods to keep notes. I never thought of them as mind mapping, but I’m sure they fit the definition.
For several years, I extensively used VoodooPad, which is a Mac app that is essentially a desktop Wiki.
The main reason that standard linear notes didn’t work is that my work wasn’t linear. For example, I did a lot of requests for proposals (RFPs) for a while and had to be able to quickly find information that didn’t always fit my categories. I also had to be able to reuse information so that I wasn’t rewriting each 100-page RFP each time. For example, I had information pre-written about a software product’s security. Sometimes, I could copy and paste that to answer a client’s question. But other times, I would use the security information in the context of listing our product’s competitive advantages. In a scenario like that, I couldn’t simply use indexes or linear outlines to keep track of information. It also didn’t work very well to search for keywords because the same term might get used so frequently. It made much more sense to create Wiki-style cross-links as information referenced other information.
I don’t use it any more, though. My current work is much more topic- and date- based and lends itself to tools like Excel and Word for tracking notes and progress.
I do agree that some people selling mind-mapping type software seem a little “cultish” about it. You have to remember that different people think differently. If you naturally want to think in the style of a mind map, but have been constantly told that you have to do it in a linear fashion… well, the discovery of mind-mapping techniques is pretty liberating.