Plan and research your documents with mind maps

We’re going to look now at how to unlock the information in your brain and then use that information to structure a report as effectively as possible. Now if you’re going to unlock the information in your brain, there are two ways you can do it. You could, for instance, just write a list.

Lists always start obviously with the first thing and then they lead to the next one and the next one. And that might work, and it’s good to write those things down before you start writing. Any plan is better than no plan.

But the trouble is that it’s linear. One item leads to the next. This one leads to that one, and so on.

And it’s all dependent on you choosing the most effective thing to unlock the information in the first place, and that, I guess, is pretty much a random event. It could depend on what you happen to be thinking about before, how tired you are. It’s not really the best way to really unlock the information and give you the best chance of plotting a logical structure.

So we’re going to look at a different technique for that. The other way you can unlock the information in your brain is to set out folders –

like this –

and then to fill in each of those

folders – if you think of them as maybe envelopes. And then you just fill in a few things from that folder, a few things from that one, a few things from that one, a few things from that one.

If you are writing a shopping list, for instance, this could be the parts of the supermarket.

And once you’ve got those categories, you can start to unlock the information, say, OK, well, produce:

what do I need? Well, I need carrots. I need peas. I need cauliflower.

If I go to bakery, I need some bread, I need some croissants.

So that’s a good way to unlock the information in your brain. But it’s perhaps a bit limited because, as you will have noticed, each of these, again, is a list. So although it’s better than a simple list, what you’ve ended up with is four lists.

So a better way to do that is not to use the folders, but to use a mind map. We’re going to use mind maps in a different way. We’re going to use them to unlock the information in your brain, and then we’re going to use them to structure the document as effectively as possible.

So let’s look at a mind map then. We’ll pick a scenario. Just imagine that you work for a law firm and you want to write a report about choosing some software that would track the hours that the lawyers bill –

their billable hours, OK? So it’s a report about time- tracking software for lawyers.

And now this next stage is important because if you’re familiar with mind maps, you’ll know that they branch out in different ways. And so you might be tempted to set it up like this to start your first branch. And then branch, and then exhaust that, and then when you’ve done that, you go to your next branch and you do the same thing.

What you’ve got here, if you do it that way, is it’s still a linear process. This is effectively a list. Instead, what you want to do is put down your main categories first –

your folders, if you like.

So what folders could we use? And these are the main categories.

Well, first of all, why? Why are we doing it? Why are we choosing this software?

Then we’ve got who will use it –

the users.

Money is always a thing isn’t it? We’re going to have to cover money.

We’ve got what the different options are, the systems that we’re using or we’re going to have to run the software on. There’s also the time-scale –

over what period are we hoping to implement this?

Oh, yes, actually implementation –

how are we going to implement it? Those are our main folders. So now we start to expand on those categories. So first of all, let’s look at this branch here.

Let’s look at why. Always a good idea to start with why.

And we’ve got what we’re doing now. So we’re using a number of systems, let’s say.

Let’s say that the lawyers, at the moment, they’re using –

I don’t know –

maybe they’re using electronic calendars. They’re using Excel spreadsheets. Maybe they’re even writing things down on bits of paper.

And the trouble with that is it’s very inefficient.

OK? It’s just cobbled together. If we were to use some time-billing software, we could say this is something that would work in the background and this would free up time. And that’s billable time, of course.

As a result, we think it would pay for itself. And that’s our why category covered. So now, we’ll just do this for the other categories or headings.

All we’re doing is exploring and expanding our categories so we cover every aspects of each one. Now remember–

we’re not putting any judgment on this information at the moment.

We’re just trying to get the information down now. We can decide later what structure to give our document. We’re just trying to get the information out of our head and onto the paper.

OK, so far, so good. We have a lot of information there. One other thing you can do with mind maps is you can use them as part of your research.

So, in this particular case, free up billable time. How much billable time?

How long would it take to use this? How long do people currently take? How much of their time do they spend on just working out their timesheets? If I knew that, then I would be able to make a very good case for this, especially as we want it to be able to pay for itself.

But I don’t know it yet. Don’t worry, that’s fine. Because in doing that, we’ve identified an important question to answer. And if you use a mind map like this, you can work out what are the questions that you need to answer in order to write your report.

OK, so let’s look at what we’ve got. Remember,

what we’ve done is we’ve looked at our broad categories first. We chose why, our users, the systems, the implementation, the price, the timescale, the options.

And then what we did was we branched out. It’s very, very important that you do things in that way. And as a result, it’s a very, very powerful technique for unlocking information that you don’t even know is there.