Most people that are stronger at organization and execution are weaker at creative brainstorming, not necessarily because of an inherent lack of ingenuity, but because their focus shifts to organization and execution too early. We simply short-change ourselves and others during the critical brainstorming phase of a decision or project because we cannot stop thinking about how to organize the explosion of ideas or how to execute the ideas that rise to the top.
If this sounds like you, I’ve got a suggestion, one that I’ve found helpful many times over. Mind mapping software is a helpful tool that sits at the intersection of ideas and the organization of them. The weakness of most of the mapping software I’ve found is that it does a poor job of appealing to the people who would benefit from it the most. The average package does a great job of helping you get your ideas onto paper and to organize them. Where it fails miserably is that it does little to help you execute. The map becomes a static reference point at best, leaving you to translate from the map into other software or processes to actually bring the ideas or decisions to life. For those of us who are organization and execution minded, the software’s inadequacies in the execution phase make its value in the brainstorming and organization phases less appealing.
Mindjet comes to the rescue here by excelling all the way through the process from brainstorming to organization and execution. Mindjet has remarkable integration with the Microsoft Office suite and services like SharePoint. You can integrate appointments, tasks, documents, links, etc. so that you’re hard work during the brainstorming and organization phases generates productivity gains. With Mindjet you can easily revisit your ideas and decisions, reorganize them on the fly and track execution from a working document that can be shared with your whole team. Enjoy.
30 day trial is available for MindJet
FreeMind is, as the name implies, a free alternative.
Posted in: Productivity, Reviews
