Upgrade your Mind Mapping

Here’s a sneak peek

My goal is to give you a practical approach to improving your mind mapping skills in order to tame life’s chaos.

You are holding Part one: Mind Mapping Fundamentals in your hands which is the fundamentals portion. After going through this book, you should be able to:

1. Know what Mind Maps are and when to use them.

2. Understand why Mind Maps are powerful in learning, memory retention and new knowledge generation.

3. Learn basic techniques that you’ll use in every mind map.

4. Have the right tools to begin mapping.

Occasionally, you will find the 📺 icon to indicate relevant video lessons if you so choose to dive deeper into each section as well as helpful tips highlighted by the 💡icon.

Part two: Mind Mapping Mastery in 7 Days is about putting your new knowledge into practice. It contains seven fully instructed daily exercises for you to sharpen your mind mapping skills. By the end of the seven days, you will be able to:

1. Create mind maps on demand with any writing tool at your disposal.

2. Better organize your life in meetings, presentations, and projects and reduce the stress of new information and incoming chaos.

3. Turn Mind Maps into productive output, such as daily to-do’s, meeting follow ups, and product design blueprints.

4. Use mind maps to better understand yourself and others.

Unlike a novel that needs to be read from beginning to end, this book is meant to be a practical reference resource to get you mind mapping right away. So feel free to skip around and come back to whichever section seems most relevant to you.

That said, I do recommend going through the seven daily exercises in order if you’re beginning your mind mapping journey or want to improve your skills. This is because each exercise has a particular objective and the program as a whole is designed to progress you through increasingly complex maps.

I’m excited that you’ve joined the Mind Map Nation family and hope that you’ll find this tool as useful as it has been for me.

Mind maps are nonlinear in that they don’t need to follow any particular sequence unlike bullet points, PowerPoints, or essays. Have a random thought or variable that just came to mind? No problem, just draw a new branch radiating from the relevant node. 

Even though I like to begin my maps in a particular direction, once it gets going, I don’t really care about the order in which I add new nodes and details. As long as there’s enough space, I’ll keep expanding the map as necessary. 

Power of Semi-Structured Thoughts

The unique properties of mind maps allow us to do three things:

First, it doesn’t force us into an “order state” too early (more on this later). Instead, in the early creative and chaotic phases of a project, it’s more useful to freely expand and examine all the variables, complexities, and possibilities. Only then can we have a true idea of what the big picture looks like, unconstrained by the need to prematurely inject artificial linearity into our project.

Second, not having to worry about linearity frees up our cognitive energy to see where things fit in the big picture. Just because mind maps are not linear doesn’t mean they are not orderly. Mind maps are “spatial” precisely because there is a logic to the way nodes are arranged and connected. Every line and every detail should be thoughtfully placed. They are semi-structured in this sense…

The full book is included in your MMN membership.

The basic anatomy of a mind map is a central idea or topic with related topics radiating outwards. These are the first level “nodes”. The direction of expansion depends on your preference, but I personally prefer going clockwise beginning from the top right corner.

Each first level node can have multiple child nodes, which represent deeper related topics. You can continue expanding a node for as long as you’d like. In fact, it’s not uncommon to grow a child node into a ton of branching nodes. The fractal nature of mind maps means that you can truly go into the weeds of detail without losing sight of the forest because the big picture is literally in front of you! 

MIND MAPPING MASTERY IN 7 DAYS

Leveling Up Your Mind Mapping Skills

You are about to take the first step towards making your life more organized and intentional using mind maps. We’ll go through a one-week program that will progress you from an absolute beginner to someone who will feel comfortable with whipping out a pen to bust complexity in any part of your life. The best part is that it’ll take about an hour a day to get there.

Below is the structure that we will follow. You will create one mind map every day for seven days.

What to Expect

Rather than simply going through generic exercises, each one is designed to get you thinking about your unique context in a systematic way. Mind mapping, after all, is a tool for structured thinking. 

I recommend keeping things simple and hand drawing each exercise rather than using a dedicated mind mapping app. 

Upon completion of this program, you will be able to use mind maps to:

1. Break down the complexity of any problem.

2. Accelerate your learning on any topic.

3. Clarify your purpose and intentions in your endeavors.

4. Construct an actionable plan to achieve your goals.

5. Understand yourself and others on a deeper level.

Day 1: Daily To-Do Mind Map

Start your day organized with the daily to-do mind map. This is a map you can make every morning before you begin working or studying to lay out your tasks and see where they fit into the larger weekly picture (which you will create a separate map for on day 6). 

In this exercise, you’ll learn to structure your day as a connected whole rather than a list of separate to-do items. In the process, you’ll practice hierarchical grouping and annotations to make your map more useful and readable. 

Why is this more effective than a traditional list? The answer lies in the map’s nonlinear nature. With this mind map, you can expand all your to-do items without first worrying about sequence and losing track of why you are doing them because you’re grouping them by major categories while assigning the priorities and time estimates afterwards. 

ESTIMATED TIME: 10-15 minutes

TEMPLATE

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Draw a box around the central topic called “Today [date]” and think of the major categories of tasks you need to do. Make child nodes radiating from the central topic with the names of those categories. Draw a circle around these child nodes to denote their status as major categories. 

1. Expand the category nodes with individual tasks as child nodes. For more complex categories, you might need intermediary categories before breaking out into tasks. Draw arrows to show connections between any tasks. 

For example, Content is a multi-headed beast composed of YouTube, Newsletter, and Reposting, each with its own set of tasks. I also have an arrow to show that after I publish the Business Development video, I’ll repost it on other social media sites to increase its reach. 

1. Bust out your red pen because we’re about to annotate and make your map 3D! Assign a time estimate to each task. Add up all the times together to determine if it’s realistic for you to accomplish everything on this map. I use 30 minute increments because I use the Pomodoro Technique of 25 minute productive time blocks with 5 minute breaks.

In the example, the aggregate estimated time to complete everything is ~9 hours. This is on the higher end, so I might consider postponing a task or two for tomorrow instead…

The full 60-page book is included your MMN membership.