MindManager 9

I used to be very sceptical about the use of ‘mind mapping’ tools. It was my distinct prejudice that drawing boxes on a screen and joining them together with lines was not a sensible way to organize ideas or plan a project.

Well, I’ve had a change of heart. This change began after reviewing version 7 of Mindjet’s MindManager. For me, the breakthrough really came when I stopped worrying about the theory and just started using the software.

The first project of any substance that I used it on was a programming problem. I was trying to make sense of a certain flow of programming logic in a complex project. There were two events in my program that triggered a whole series of other events. These two events had distinctly different starting points but a shared end-point. Moreover, there were many interactions between the two sequences of events. I was, frankly, finding is hard to visualise what all the interactions were.

But as soon as I plotted it out with MindManager, everything became clear. For the first time, instead of having a complex problem sloshing around in my head, it was there, in front of me, clear and unambiguous – I could see it, focus on key areas, draw diagrams to represent interactions and, ultimately, simplify the design and improve my code.

Since then, I have used MindManager to assist with all sorts of other problems. In the past, I have generally used either a spreadsheet or the Microsoft Word Outliner to plan projects. An outline is great if the project is sequential – so it can be decomposed into branches from A to Z, with each branch having its own set of sub-branches. A spreadsheet is fine if the project can be mapped into a matrix with People (for example) shown in columns and responsibilities shown in rows.

But often projects are not this neat. Person A might have to work with Person B to solve a problem shared with team C which is working in cahoots with team D which reports back to team A and so on. This doesn’t fit into an outline or a spreadsheet. You could do it on a whiteboard, of course, with boxes and arrows and notes drawn between all the component elements. Or you can do it in MindManager. My preference would very much be for Mind Manager. It’s much easier to use and more flexible. And if you have 20 Mind maps you don’t need 20 whiteboards!

Incidentally, MindManager also lets you view your plan as outlines and you can export data and images of mind maps to other applications including to a Word Outline – though, of course, the exported outline will only include the hierarchical view of your data and won’t have all the ‘freeform’ links available within MindManager itself.

New features in this release include Project Gantt Charts and timelines for scheduling resources, the ability to create slide presentations, improved WYSIWYG printing , new icon libraries to let you add pre-drawn graphics to map elements and an updated user interface.

For any type of project that doesn’t form a single hierarchical sequence (outline) or a matrix (spreadsheet), MindManager would be a great planning or brainstorming tool. It could be used to create maps of project teams and resources; it could be used to map your next novel or Hollywood block buster move – with characters, relationships, critical events and so on. Mind Manager gives you the flexibility to create visual plans and textual notes with links between elements in ways that other type of software cannot.

It may take a bit of trial and error to find your own way of working with MindManager. But once you’ve started, you may wonder how you ever managed without it.