Organizing Thoughts

 

Mind Map created with SimpleMind

Right now I started watching videos on Mind Mapping by Sheng Huang. I was doing my usual rounds on YouTube after work, cheking on planner videos and organization videos, mainly because more and more I'm leaning towards buying a new planner for 2023. You know, the Personal sized, zipped, leather variety of planners. Now it might sound like quite a mental leap to go from checking planners to watching mind map videos, but nobody said YouTube tends to be consistent in their offering of things they think you may like (or even nailing what you were looking for).

Mind maps are graphics you draw where ideas are written in a concentrated, concise form (let's say, fitting a bubble), and then are connected with other ideas through lines or arrows. The connection can mean anything, like a next step or an idea that's born from a previous one, or a relationship betweem two ideas. It's pretty freeform, not like a flowchart, where even the shape of the bubble has a meaning. The point in a mind map is to help you catch an idea you have, develop it in general lines (what comes next, what can be connected with it, what other parts or details it has, and so on), so you can either capture the idea and the review it before putting it to paper definitively. It could also work as a guiding general map for a project, where you can have a birdseye view of the parts of the project and what goes into each part, or how they relate to each other.

As I was watching the video (and after I have spent also some time copying into a word file some info I want to migrate eventually from my A5 Malden to my Personal Lockwood - when the time comes), the idea occured to me, that maybe now a mind map could help me clear out some of the many mixes I had in my head regarding my thesis. Spoiler alert: it didn't. But as I was watching one of the videos, I went into the App Store and typed "mind map" and hit enter. I've got a couple of options - and why is it that the add part of the app is always so fantastic, but then the app itself is not so much. I started tweeking the app, tried it out with the general topic of my thesis, and though I've got some ideas landed on it, it just wasn't working for me. Things were hidden and I couldn't see the whole thing. It didn't feel like something I could actually work my way.

On the videos, the youtuber was working on paper, in a Traveler's Notebook and using two frixion pens, a blue and a red. Though he was constricted in space, his process seemed more clear and more manageable that what the app was doing for me on a space that was supposed to be more flexible. There I've got thinking of my braindump notebooks, which I use haphazardly, and which are the cause of why I lose information (because I forgot I didn't wrote it down in my filofax, but in the current braindump notebook, a spiralbound notebook I would love more if the lines of the pages weren't so bold). I have not tried yet to do the mind map exercise in my current filofax, but I must admit that it did get me thinking: if I start doing mindmaps, would it be sustainable in a personal size planner? I tend to write a lot, and my fountain pens are pretty much M-nibbed. Even my F-nib Lamys write bold like hearty M-nibs. So, shall I rethink my pens or my planner choice?

The mind map hype may end up in nothing, but I did got thinking about how different ways of planning and organizing ideas can coexist in different planning systems. I will try out the mindmapping, see if it's something for me or not, and I'll try to keep you posted.