Software for mindmapping and information organization

Vegetable or royalty – take your pick with mindmapping
Whether you have vegetable or royal aspirations, I can confirm that you'll find mindmapping a great way of calming yourself down when you have many calls on your time, ideas buzzing round your head and objectives to meet. But it must fit your own personal style of thinking, and you must set aside the time to do it! That's how I bust stress, not by mapping out my stressful times. But we're all different, and maybe this will work for you.   [Vic]






How to Be Cool As a Cucumber and King of All Your Survey with Mind Mapping

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The most common syndrome affecting each one of us is stress. The fast pace of life has brought in its wake, a great deal of stress. The incredible range of automation and convenient commodities and products, far from relieving us from the mundane, has only added to more problems and stress. We seem to be under constant pressure on all fronts that stress has become an inevitable process.

To fight the stress, you need to analyze the causes of your short-term and long-term stress in your life. This will give you a clear insight into how you react to stress, and help you to identify the areas and levels of stress. One effective means is to maintain Stress Log on a regular basis to record information about the stresses you are experiencing so you can analyze and help manage them effectively. This is of great significance, as we tend to forget how we reacted to a particular situation over time, and thus such stress situations fail to get the attention they deserve. Stress Logs will indicate the causes of stress in detail, the levels of stress at which you are at your efficient best, how you react to them and whether your reactions are appropriate to the situations. Mind Maps can best serve the cause of such Stress Diaries.

You can maintain a daily log of your stress routine and those that occur occasionally. Using Mind Maps you can divide your different areas of stress, and log in your stress situation under each of them. Your reactions will form another core detail, and a separate link to causes will reveal the subjective element that is playing within for triggering such stress responses. If it is not possible to note them by the hour, you can, at the end of the day, note all these aspects in your Mind Map Stress Book.

Also, you can use a subjective assessment on a scale of ten to record the happiest and unhappiest moments of the day. You can again rate your work efficiency and inefficiency levels for different activities. You can then identify those situations that caused you maximum stress and those in which you were most relaxed, using the rating scale. You can, in addition, note the kind of reactions you experienced, such as anger, headache, shooting back pain, raised pulse rate, sweaty palms, flushed face, etc. The way you handled stress solutions either by solving or inflaming them more will also help in assessing your stress reactions.

Unlike the conventional method of orderly listing of facts on a sheet, using Mind Map Stress Logs or Diaries will provide a broad canvass for noting the different areas and aspects of stress that you experienced. At a single glance, you can gain the full picture of your stress and know your stress patterns. Since the whole aspects of your stress life is captured in a single Mind Map, you will find it easy to identify your stress routine, plug those stress areas, learn the causative factors and generally reveal ways to tackle and manage your stress levels.

The frequency of your stress syndrome and how well you handled various stress situations are other indicators for throwing light on your stress profile. Based on your analysis you can then work out appropriate responses and solutions. By going beyond the mere obvious and surface, and digging deep into your inner pattern of attitude and emotional response, Mind Maps reveal your inner stress self. For any solution, you need to have a clear picture of the causes and effect of stresses, before working out answers for mitigating them. The judicious use and application of your Mind Map Stress Logs can indeed prove to be your most efficient stress busters.

About the author:

Dr. Vj Mariaraj is a Mind Map enthusiast and has been using Mind Maps for the past twelve years. He has created over 5650 Mind Maps. To learn more about mind mapping send an email to freemindmap@aweber.com . He is the founder of BusinessBookMindMap.com that creates Mind Map Summaries of Businees Books. To learn more visit http://BusinessBookMindMap.com/mind-map.php?go=13

Written by: Dr. Vj Mariaraj

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Articles
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Here is another slant on getting your writing going -- research and a dash of mindmapping.   [Vic]

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There's only a brief mention of mindmapping here, but it's obviously important to the author. Anyway, to me it's a great article on getting moving with writing. I hope you find it so, too.   [Vic]

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The key to getting something useful out of this article is to read the author’s title carefully. Mind mapping simplifies the process of project estimating -- it doesn’t simplify the actual task-time estimation. Every project manger knows that the work of a project must be broken into separate and manageable units for estimating. To look at a project and think “That’s about a week’s effort” is a recipe for frustration and missed targets. Mindmaps, spider diagrams and bubble charts are excellent for the first phase of breaking a project into manageable parts. For me mindmaps, as strictly defined by Buzan’s rules, are less suitable than spider diagrams for this type of analysis, but we can assume that Dr. Mariaraj is not being too strict in his use of the term below. [Vic]

Tony Buzan has defined these "rules" for Mind Mapping:

I believe these rules are well worth following if you use mindmaps for learning. They are very hard to follow completely and rigidly - and its not worth trying I have found - if you use mindmaps in adult life, in your work or projects.

Who invented mind mapping

This comes up from time to time - usually in the form of "Buzan didn't invent mind mapping".


What do you think? Producing a Mind Map Stress Log could help you get a view of what's going wrong if you're overstressed. But if it turns out to be your project manager's demands, there may not be much you can do except show her your Stress Log.   [Vic]