5 steps of mindmapping to determine your goals [Hack Your Day]
Going from May to June my project count jumped from about 3 to about 9, in addition to all the ideas and future developments I have in mind. If you’ve ever had your mind totally full and couldn’t write up a list for fear of forgetting something, here’s a 5 step list to make sure you get everything down in detail.
Now I never use mindmaps to organize myself continuously, I think it’s a tremendous tool to quickly draw up all the projects and related groups of tasks you have in mind, and then derive everything you need to do from there. I found myself in front of an empty Remember The Milk inbox, I wanted to reorganize all my project and their tasks, and I was at a complete loss. There’s Blogtastique which drains my resources a lot nowadays, there’s Hack Your Day, which I want to return my attention to, there’s all the guest blogging I do, some article writing I do freelance, translation work my musical life I want to revive, and a load of ideas I want to develop. I am fully capable of completing all these, but when faced with writing up a task list my mind was bubbling with things I didn’t want to leave out. I got a single piece of paper, a pen, and started the ten minute work that led me to be completely organized, here’s how:
1. Follow your thoughts
This may seem like a stupid point, but I think people try to cling to some sort of order in everything, and I believe this is the stage to let go, Don’t think in terms of categories, projects, time frame, just start writing. Draw a circle in the center, label it “Projects” and follow your train of thought. You can write up all your projects on different branches, or start writing, then spend time on project two developing it with sub branches and so on.
The point of this is to just let everything come out naturally. This will clear your mind somewhat and then let you concentrate on adding details here and there. The reason you should not follow any type of order is that you will loose focus, and start thinking about the order, not the actual items. This point is the most important one, let go of everything, just start writing anything that comes to mind.
2. Add details
Once you have initially jotted down everything you should actually have an almost complete list. Remember, we are not really adding tasks, but projects and sub-projects. This can get a bit tricky though, my philosophy is to add projects and continuous tasks. So for Hack Your Day I would have “Management”, “Marketing” and “Posting” for example as sub-projects. Indeed, posting is a task, but since it needs to be done indefinitely, it can be considered a project at this point.
When I talk about adding details I mean really thinking about stuff. This is the time that you may actually get some new ideas, since everything put down on paper is now out of your head, giving way to some new neuron activity in there. Actively try to think of new things to add, or new connections between items. By the way, you should also add connections in this stage. For example, my Blogtastique projects feed into the maintaining of the Blogtastique main page, since I want to let everyone know if Blogtastique is managing Gawker Media or CNN blogs right? I might also post about some of my awesome customers and so on. Essentially these are data flow connections and may be left out, but I like to see them in there for information’s sake.
3. Translate your mindmap into lists
By this stage you should be organized and I got here in about 10 minutes with a huge load of projects on my paper. The next steps can be altered or combined, altogether they will be about another 30 minutes, but well worth it in the long run.
I know lists may be a bit old fashioned nowadays due to things like Remember the Milk, Todoist and so on, but we’ll get there, don’t worry. Create a three column list for each big project and label them “to do”, “ongoing” and “plans”. The to do column should contain all your short term tasks related to that project, with the exception of ongoing stuff. The ongoing column should contain items you need to do repeatedly. For me this is posting and management, but in some cases you may not need this column at all. The plans section should contain any items you wish to complete in the future, say in between 2 weeks and 2 months. If you have long term goals, I recommend a fourth column named “future” for 1 - 2 year goals.
The purpose of this is now to get right down to the nuts and bolts of your life. From “clean my room” to “implement new cms system”, you should get everything down and out. In many cases this could take some time, so if you want to be very thorough you can devote 10 minutes to each project, and you don’t have to do it all on the same day.
4. Highlight your project backbone
This is something I came up when doing my mindmap to determine three things. The most important tasks I need to do right now and the most important project to develop. Take your pen and trace the whole route from the beginning of your mindmap (the projects circle) to the sub-projects containing your 3 most urgent items. Take a different colored pen and trace the path to the three tasks you have the most important “plans” items for.
This may lead to some pretty complicated stuff, and you will need to make sense of it yourself. If many lines run into the same project you then have a pretty important project. If all lines go to different sub-projects, but have a common project, you then prioritize that project. The point here is to give you an overview of your most urgent, and most important tasks.
5. Transfer all the data to the app of your choice
If you like you can keep all this on paper, but if you’re the web 2.0 type of guy I am, you’ll want to look for some fancy online solutions. I vouch for Remember the Milk and Todoist for free options, or Nozbe and Vitalist for not so free options (although both have basic free accounts). Using these tools is an art form all in itself, so I won’t go there, but you can use all the tagging, categorizing, contexting, time-tracking tools at your disposal.
6. Revisit mindmapping once in a while
This is an awesome, extra productivity step, wow! The idea here is to create a mindmap without actually consulting your lists every 2 -3Â months. Of course you should be getting roughly the same results as you can see in the lists, but it never hurts to check for 2 reasons.
Primarily, many people are tardy in their list servicing. They forget to add here, forget to delete there, and lists get jumbled up. Revisiting these steps help clear up any messes in there, and clarify goals. Secondly, it serves as a great feedback tool to see if your priorities have changes. Not thinking of a task at all these days? Having way to much to do in other tasks, no problem, your mindmap and task lists will tell you!
Original post here: Daniel
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