Right now, the pressure is on as university, high school and college students are in the middle of the exam period. For students who need a helping hand juggling revision schedules or remembering key information, Mind Mapping is a proven method for boosting organisation, focus and recall ability. Follow these 6 smart studying tips with Mind Mapping and iMindMap to help you combat exam stress and perform at your best.
There are good meetings and bad meetings. Bad meetings drag on forever, never seeming to get to the point and you leave wondering why you even attended. Effective meetings leave you feeling accomplished, energised and eager to take the next steps.
By adopting the Mind Mapping technique, you can plan and lead meetings with precision to ensure that you utilise information, time and resources to their full potential. Here are 3 simple ways you can use Mind Mapping and iMindMap to make time-wasting meetings a thing of the past…
Have you ever had a brilliant idea that you were excited to share, only for fear to kick in and stop you in your tracks? What if others thought it was unrealistic, flawed or odd? At some point, we can all fall victim to self-doubt. Don’t fret, Mind Mapping a Greens and Reds Analysis will help you to eliminate any uncertainty surrounding your ideas.
The Greens and Reds Analysis is a simple but effective problem solving strategy that allows you to identify an idea’s pros and cons to encourage confident choices. By analysing your idea, you will build a strong case around it before you present it to others. In the example below, we will imagine that we manage a company’s I.T. department and we want to put forward the idea of team members working from home a few days a week. For the most effective analysis, we recommend weighing up the ‘Greens and Reds’ of your idea using the Mind Mapping technique, which we will get into below.
When it comes to solving problems, your perspective only provides one view of a situation, limiting creativity. The Six Thinking Hats technique encourages you to switch between thinking styles to consider a problem from different angles and generate a variety of ideas and possible solutions.
You may be familiar with this technique already, but have you tried it with Mind Mapping? A Mind Map’s outward radiating branches and keywords prompt you to make associations between your thoughts and generate more ideas. With an overview of your ideas, you will easily spot the gaps in your analysis and can devote more attention to those areas.
Adopt a thinking style one-by-one, adding to your Mind Map as you go. During this exercise, you will have to review previous sections to complete another. A Mind Map’s structure doesn’t require you to think ‘in order’, so you can jump back and forth to build on different areas when needed.
Let’s get started…
One thing we often feel we are lacking is time. To get the most out of your day accurate planning is a must, and when you’re working on a time-scaled project, planning is essential to ensure you’re at your productive best.
A timeline is an easy-to-digest, visual overview of a project with a clear end goal. The addition of the Time Map View in iMindMap 10 Ultimate unites the creative power of Mind Mapping with the effectiveness of timelines. iMindMap has helped traditional project planning to evolve, taking you to new levels of inspiration and efficiency. It’s designed to support your most ambitious projects from kick-off to launch, and at every stage in-between. Here are 5 reasons why iMindMap will be your essential companion to push any kind of project across the finish line.
Perhaps you are planning an event, or a marketing campaign for the year ahead. In the infancy phase of your project, you’re going to need to spend time gathering your initial thoughts. Drop ideas onto your canvas in the Fast Capture View. Forget formatting and structuring at this stage, simply fire ideas down into self-organising bubbles. The free-form nature of the Fast Capture View nurtures a creative mindset, so your brain is free to explore every avenue of your project.
According to a recent survey, a shocking 94% of knowledge workers have at some point felt overwhelmed by information to the point of powerlessness. A 2012 study by the University of California suggests that current data levels are the equivalent of everyone consuming 12 hours of information each day. In practice, that means that three quarters of our time is spent receiving information – no wonder we are all getting overwhelmed! Too much information can significantly diminish our attention span and focus, not to mention hinder our ability to be creative. The impact on individuals varies from simple time-wasting to serious stress. For organisations, this can result in a damaging loss of productivity. But fear not. You can transform crushing quantities of information into something meaningful and give your brain the freedom to think using our Mind Mapping technique.
Here’s how…
As a blogger, a lot rides on your ability to think up new and creative concepts for content. But unless you can develop and organise these ideas, then your blog is at risk of falling off track.
iMindMap is a creative and highly visual software. Using its three different views, Fast Capture, Brainstorm and Mind Map, iMindMap allows you to spark, develop and bring order to your greatest blogging ideas.
Read on to find out how iMindMap can breathe fresh life into your blog, by giving your thoughts clarity and your ideas space to grow.
Fast Capture Your Creative Ideas
Head full of ideas but no clue where to start? iMindMap’s Fast Capture View gives you the chance to pour all those rough thoughts out and create order from what can feel like chaos. Fire off ideas into Fast Capture View and watch as it creates a self-forming web of bubbles. These bubbles will help make fleeting thoughts tangible and will give you an idea of which to develop further.
At iMindMap we are big believers in limitless, creative thinking. But once you’ve got your idea, how do you take that dream from Mind Map to reality? Last week saw the launch of the latest version of DropTask – DropTask 2. We have been making the most of the new DropTask features by integrating* this powerful productivity tool with iMindMap. By combining the two, you can turn your greatest thoughts into visually appealing, easy to follow plans of action. Here’s how…
Seamless integration
Simplicity is a major part of both DropTask and iMindMap, and so their integration is as straight-forward as you’d expect. Export your Mind Maps into a new DropTask project, and watch as your branches of ideas burst into bubbles of action. From map to project, you’ll be presented with a clear path forward based on your own thinking, that makes perfect sense to you.
This week DropTask launched the long awaited, redesigned version of their hugely popular task management software. DropTask is an entirely visual task management application that can oversee the implementation of any project, be it long or short term, professional or something more personal.
DropTask has always been a favourite of ours at iMindMap, as it allows our users to make their greatest ideas happen. DropTask 2 has a whole host of new features that we know iMindMap users are going to love.
Move over summer, a new school year is coming. Students and teachers, it’s time to get back into the swing of things. Plan for the busy days ahead using a Mind Map to turn last minute mayhem into blissful efficiency. Read our Mind Mapping tips to help keep your assignments, activities, plans, tests and notes in order and set yourself up for a stress-free school year.
