Fluent Brain

In May 2011, Mindjet announced its new Mappie Award contest. I submitted my planning dashboard map for the January award, and I won it. A few days later, I received a nice trophy by mail. Sweet!

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It’s time to push the boundaries.

It’s time to get creative, and let our thoughts wander into the possibilities.

In Part 1, we covered the bugs in MindManager.

Part 2 suggested several usability improvements.

This article is dedicated to thinking beyond the next version of MindManager.

My purpose here, again, is to contribute to your team. I want to share my vision for MindManager, which I use daily for my own needs and those of my clients through visual facilitation. I have gained a fair amount of experience with your software over the years, and it’s my way of giving back.

Take what is useful, and discard the rest. I have no expectations whatsoever, other than perhaps initiating a conversation within your company as to what will go into the next versions of MindManager.

Let’s get started with the small changes, keeping the bigger ideas for the end.

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Dear Mindjet team, this series of articles is for you.

It is for you to read, think over, discriminate. Decide what makes sense for your target market – what I’m sharing here is MY perspective. And it is that of a full-time visual facilitator. I use MindManager daily, for my own needs as well as those of my clients.

I don’t believe I fit within the definition of your typical customer. I don’t think that MindManager is intended for hardcore visual service providers, but if there are a couple of things in what I suggest that resonate with you, I’ll be more than happy to have contributed in that way to the evolution of your product!

These are the sections we’ll be covering in this part about usability improvements:

1. Creating The Map: Topic creation, dates, boundaries, selecting elements, relationships, hyperlinks.
2. Basic Operations: Copy and paste, drag and drop, zooming.
3. Formatting: Removing the formatting, changing the font size, formatting topic lines, highlighting, positioning topics, balancing the map, aligning topics.
4. Menus, Tabs, Windows: Closing tabs, opening hyperlinks, reordoring map parts, shortcuts.
5. Indexing
6. Printing: Default printing setting.

I also invite my fellow visual facilitators, mind mappers and MindManager users to give your take on what is presented here.

Without further ado, let’s get started! (more…)

The best use of willpower is as an investment towards the installation of powerful habits (routines).

This spreadsheet is derived from the free one offered at Get Clients Now. It allows you to track which habits you are doing, and which ones you aren’t.

It helps you get accountable to yourself. You are more likely to follow through on your commitments this way.

Go ahead and download the following spreadsheet, it is free : )

Notice that it contains two tabs. The first one is the empty table that you need to fill. The second tab contains an example to better understand how to use this tool. (more…)

During the past 10 years, I had the opportunity to test out just about every mind mapping software available on the market.

Below you will find my favorite picks.

Hopefully, this will help you decide more easily which tool to go with.

Mindjet MindManager

This is the main tool I use daily, by myself and with my clients. It seems to be the most popular mind mapping tool out there. A lot of big corporations chose it over other options.

It is feature-rich and easy to use, and it integrates with Microsoft Office and Sharepoint among others. (more…)

This post is part of the Message To Mindjet series. If you haven’t read the introduction yet, I explain why I’m writing these articles.

In part 1, I am listing bugs I found in Mindjet MindManager 2012 version 10.0.445. By bugs, I mean things that the software does that it is not supposed to, or things it doesn’t do that it is supposed to. So I’m not referring to crashes, errors, exceptions or faults. Fortunately, I didn’t find any of those! (more…)

Hello to the Mindjet team, and to fellow MindManager aficionados!

MindManager is a great tool, with a lot of potential and some shortcomings.

At Fluent Brain, I work as a full-time professional visual facilitator. I chose to work with MindManager since version 7, and I’ve been using every version since.

I decided to contribute to you, the Mindjet team…

• my experience with MindManager
• my visual facilitation expertise
• my vision for a better software

… so that you are able to create a better tool. Your users (may they be amateur or professional mind mappers), will benefit from a higher-quality product that better satisfies their needs and allows for more efficient information management. As a consequence, satisfaction will go up and you will make more sales.
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I like when my place is clean.

But I don’t like having to be the one who does the cleaning. I find it a boringly repetitive task that builds nothing in my life.

A while ago I invited a girl over for dinner.

I didn’t take the time to do all the dishes and put everything back in its place. Before she got to my place, It was still a bit of a mess.

I anticipated what was coming as the door bell rang.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just give a gift to the people on your list, just to email them out of nowhere and say “here’s something great for you, no strings, no charge”?

That’s a great way to build a relationship.

Doing something great usually takes time and energy and you have to charge for it to recoup your investment.

There is a way to create that valuable gift for free: Mind Mapping.

By extracting the essence of your content and putting it into mind maps, you can easily repackage it into a visual PDF handout that is easy to understand and print.

Your audience will love you for giving them this gift. They will become more engaged, and even buy more from you. Based on the reciprocity law, they will also want to help you more. (more…)

Would you like to supercharge your mind mapping?

I packaged the Supercharging Your Mapping blog post series into an E-Book. It is available for you to download, right now, and for FREE.

Here’s what you will learn:

Part 1 : Mind Mapping Techniques to Create Your Mind Maps

• Fast ways to insert a new element on the same level, reorder elements, and insert a parent branch
• The best practices with relationships, callouts, boundaries, free floating elements and icons
• The 3 components you can increase your speed with

Part 2 : Navigation Using Mind Maps

• Expand, collapse and close branches quickly
• Show X levels, and all levels
• Right click to move the map
• The best way to show a branch alone

Part 3: Power Mind Mapping With Formatting

• Color-code your maps
• Break your maps into sub-maps in only a few seconds

Simply enter your name and email below, and you will receive it in your inbox.