Last week, we had a guest post from 11th Grader, Amy Mack. Today, her twin sister, Wendy, shares her experiences with Mapping and MindManager:

The Value of Mind Mapping

Although I have been using the Mind Mapping process for as long as I can remember, I did not start using MindManager until around the age of nine.  At first, I used MindManager only for my robotics team, mapping out the information that would be included in our sponsorship letters and updates, or even creating a road map for the various awards that we wanted to win and the steps that we needed to take to get there.  Later, I began to realize how useful mind mapping really was – especially for my school work.

I have never been very good at taking a system that someone else uses and trying to learn and apply it to the work that I was doing.  I have especially struggled with the concept of using outlines for reports and essays.  I often found it much harder to think creatively or come up with good ideas when I was so busy trying to arrange my outline just so in order to get a good grade.  So I turned to mind mapping.  For me, mind mapping was much more free style.  When I was little, I could draw pictures of things instead of words, or use shapes to represent certain categories.  Since I was one of the main programmers for my robotics team, I often used flow charts to help me understand how my program would run.

I found that I was able to be much more creative when I captured my ideas into a mind map, because I could get ideas out without worrying about how I should arrange them into a format – as I constantly did with outlines.  When I started to use MindManager, I loved how it made capturing those same ideas much faster and it even had an outline view so that I could get the general idea as to what my outline should look like!  My professors liked seeing my mind maps as well, and one professor even gave me extra credit when I turned my map in with my paper.

Now that I am working for my father’s company, I am using MindManager to help me organize information about events and even about our software product.  I have really found mind mapping useful for almost all parts of my life:  for work, for school, and for fun.

Here are some maps that I created for school, my robotics team, and the GTD Summit

Studying with Mind Maps:

Download example ’study’ map: The Role of Photosynthesis in Plants

Organizing information to secure sponsorships for our Robotics team

Download example idea map: LEGO Mountaineers Junior Robotics Sponsorship Ideas

Planning my participation at an industry event to support my work for eProductivity

Download sample event planning map: GTD Summit Planning

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