For those of us who tend to work and think predominantly with our left brain, it is important to ramp up right brain time – especially when we are brainstorming and nurturing innovative projects.
Mindmapping is a fun and productive way to tap the strengths of your right brain and capture dynamic ideas on paper. By working in a non-linear way, you’ll find that mindmapping is an essential tool for all kinds of thinking activities (including everything from meeting agenda creation to project planning).
So how does mindmapping work? How do you mindmap?
Joyce Wycoff, Co-Founder of InnovationNetwork and author of Mindmapping: Your Personal Guide to Exploring Creativity and Problem-Solving, has written a concise (yet thorough) article entitled Mindmapping in 8 Easy Steps.
While mindmapping with paper and color markers is fun and productive, you might find Mindjet’s mindmapping software, MindManager, to be a great idea facilitator. In particular, this easy-to-use software helps you get the ideas down so that you may begin the process of building associations and linkages among those ideas (thereby strengthening them and further clarifying your thinking).
Once something is in ink, one tends to hesitate to cross out and redraw. MindManager lets you drag main topics and sub topics to new locales on the map with the greatest of ease. Plus, you can add URL links, PDFs, spreadsheets, and databases to your map, enabling it to completely house your project at one central place.
Rev up your right brain and watch your innovative ideas and productivity soar!
