Monday 8/12/2002 6:45 PM
Mind Mapper becomes Mind Manager and I don’t really Mind!

For better or for worse I am addicted to listening to audio books as I travel the autobahn, as I shower and shave in the morning and yea and verily even as I cardio exercise on the treadmill. So I found this audio tape at Book Country, a discount and remainder book store here in the Pgh area. It was about Mind Mapping.

I was familiar with a computer software program that purported to use mind mapping and I found the idea intriguing enough to plop down the less than half price of the two audio cassette package. This on Sunday, I waited till this morning to set the cassette in my jet blue sport edition cassette player and cranked up the volume as I strode through the six am open doors for my rendezvous with the tortuous machine that pretends to give you a cardio workout. After 4 minutes my heart is pumping a breath taking 130 beats on its way to 140 as I listen to the mind mapping pleasures that are arrayed in my ear and hence virtually in my head and I literally gasp for breath.

What can you use mind mapping for? Well it turns out for everything. Need to organize the food in your refrigerator. Mind Map. How about a trip to Antarctica? Mind Map. Plan the intricacies of your entire life for the next hopeful fifty years. Yep, a short sketch away on a note pad or in my case, as I shall inform you all presently, on the computer keyboard. Mind Map!

Now what is mind mapping really good for? Well the guy hits the nail on the head with a sledge when he mentions that we often use outlining as an organizing kind of principle without really having any topics to outline. As we fill notions in, some move to the bottom, some to the top and our organization which is never reasoned and linear starts to look pretty ghastly. It becomes untidy, dirty, without reason, out of sorts, mean, out of focus and …get the picture? (It is hard for such an undisciplined, undisciplinable and rebellious lout as me to really care, feel, or talk much about the virtues of organization.)

So mind mapping, in which you on a piece of paper put a topic that is key to the idea at hand and then you free form lay in lines of connections which lead to sub topics off sub tropics which all in all helps to give you the kindling for the fire of your organized outline.

Intrepid I go off to the internet to look for the program that I had once used and abandoned. I don’t find it. Rather one called Visual Mind and it does upon trial download some spiffing stuff. I try a topic. And damn! It works plenty good. I look further. It turns out that Mind Mapper, the program that I originaly sought, has become Mind Manager, a far more imposing title and even more grandios yet there is a Standard, a Business and an Enterprise Edition.

I with grave alacrity download the trial business edition and am more than pleased with the features which include ready linking with most of the Microsoft Office Programs that I use. So (I must admit after an abortive attempt at finding a crack) I buy the program for my company. It is now on this computer which just tickles my mind in erotic places.

I can now plan my entire life with circles and colors and subtopics and images and files from the computer. I am one happy fellow.

It really takes so little.