How I Mind Map the Next 3 Months
I was especially restless last week as I sat down to work on some videos. I kept asking: “how do my actions fit into the bigger picture?”
In When to Use Mind Maps, I drew this diagram to illustrate the fluctuations of order and chaos over the course of a project.
A project fluctuates between order and chaos as new information comes in. Mind Maps are great at reorienting our plans when we feel lost in the chaos.
I’m now at that bottom inflection point with the MMN Community. “Good” creative chaos is on the rise, but chaos nonetheless.
This is where the planning map comes in, which I’ve used for annual planning in previous companies. However, you can deploy it whenever you need to understand how your day-to-day actions feed into a larger purpose. This mind map took about four hours across two sessions to make and covers my projects in the next 3 months. I used four colors but you can probably get away with three or even two depending on your needs.
PDF download here if you want to really zoom in.
The BLUE portions are the break downs of the major focus areas/projects of MMN, YouTube, Coaching and Hiring. I added a fifth major node called Factors to take into account important principles, constraints, and questions that influence all the other nodes.
The RED portions are arrows that form feedback loops, annotations, and stars that represent action items. The red pops and let’s me see how the map works at a glance. Most of the arrows point to improving the community, which also drives content, thus forming a virtuous feedback loop.
The ORANGE portions are the roles I need to take for each project. It also helps with hiring. In order to delegate effectively, I need to be granular about what I do.
Sometimes I will have smaller maps to distill action items from the larger map. In this case, it’s under Other Actions where I design two Kanban boards that I use to track my progress across MMN and video work.
With a good grasp of top Q4 priorities and their components, I now use GREEN to map out the metrics. As the saying goes, what can’t be measured, can’t be improved. It’s even more important to identify what to measure. If your metrics don’t match the nature and purpose of your project, then you’re optimizing the wrong things.
Metrics come in two forms. Quantitative metrics are anything that can be objectively counted and expressed in numbers. For example, YouTube has click-through rate and subscriber growth. Qualitative metrics are subjective feedback like comments and direct messages.
Since both MMN and coaching are in the beginning phases, it’s more important to pay attention to qualitative feedback because you can easily improve the product when it’s small. This means I’ll be reading every community post and gauging the reception of the ebooks, live events and challenge programs.
As the community grows, I’ll pay more attention to quantitative metrics. My YouTube channel has reached enough scale for this quantitative approach, but I began by only paying attention to the comments for the first 1.5 years AND publishing consistently. As long as I'm creating value for folks and I'm following the right process, the channel will grow.
Also in GREEN are goals, which are split between result-oriented (performance-based like getting x number of customers or being able to play a popular song on your guitar) and process-oriented goals (those you can directly control, such as journaling every week or making a daily mind map).
When you’re starting out, it’s more important to keep process goals until you start getting some results. Focusing on the process curbs a bunch of mental hurdles like social comparing and self doubt. If your system and process are solid, the results will come. Once you have enough quantifiable results, you can use quantitative metrics to improve your process.
My process goals for MMN are to host Office Hours every week, a new group challenge every month, reply to posts within 48 hours, and encourage members to host their own events and initiate new posts. The result goals are an awesome experience for our members measured by their qualitative feedback.
Here’re a few other insights I gleamed from this exercise:
Switching cost: be cognizant of focus cost whenever I switch tasks and put on a new hat (remember those orange roles).
Energy level: I’m most alert in the morning, so I’ll do the hardest things first like filming and writing and shift meetings and emails to the afternoon.
Optionality strategy: keep enough slack in my schedule to say yes to cool opportunities if they arise. It's no fun to live on guard rails all the time.
Power tools: with the community and newsletter picking up, I need to upgrade my tools (Notion & 2nd brain) to run more efficiently. I also need to be more organized to delegate effectively.
Hire & delegate: this is going to be a challenge for me because I'll need to hire, train, and manage going forward instead of doing everything myself. These are all new roles that'll take time to grow into. It'll get harder before it gets easier.
The next step after this map is to turn it into organized steps like: Kanban boards (medium term 1-3 months), 2-week sprints (short term), daily to-do’s, and Pomodoro sessions (hourly). I’ll share my first sprint mind map in the next post.
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