Mindmaps

Mindmaps are powerful tools to help you understand any project better. Here is how I use them professionally, plus some extra benefits.

One of the best tools to organize your thoughts are mindmaps. They help me structure my projects better than anything else. They are simple, quick, easy-to-use — yet hardly anyone I know uses them.

Let me give you a quick introduction. I would like to show you how I use mindmaps for project management in the construction industry, and how I have used mindmaps to organize my thoughts when I felt stressed out.

Mindmaps for project management

When I start up a new project, I have a basic mindmap setup that helps me focus on the important stuff. There is a lot to be done, and traditional to-do lists don’t show me what is important, so I use the mindmap instead.

The project name goes in the middle of the paper (software does this automatically):

The name of the project is in the centre of the mindmap

Then I add the important issues I have to handle:

The second level of your mindmap consists of the headings. This is the most important level. Any lower levels help you structure this level.

In this example, I have added:

• Time, deliverables and budget: The “magic threesome” every project manager has to balance
• The contract: If I don’t have a contract, agreeing on a contract with the client is critical. If I have a contract, I want to make sure I know it very well (this includes asking a lot of questions to experts).
• The organization: I want to find good people to help me with my project.
• Interdisciplinary issues: There are always issues that several people have to work together in order to resolve. No one is directly responsible for these, so there is a high risk that they create problems. I want to follow up on these issues frequently.
• Changes and extracontractual work: There are always changes to a project, and the scope always expands. I want to make sure I keep track of this. At the beginning of a project, this subject is obviously empty, but I put it on my mindmap in order to remember.

Add details to the lower levels

I can expand every subject as needed. The level of detail can vary a lot. For example, I develop my time schedule in a different document, so the finished mindmap regarding time schedule might just look like this:

I have my time schedule in a different software, so I just keep a link in my mindmap. I like to keep the important deadline though, so I always remember them.

For my organization, I want to make sure I have all the right people. On a big project, it might look like this:

This is an example of the organisation for design projects in the construction industry. You can adapt this to your industry.

As I add people to my team, I like adding check boxes to quickly see who I miss. Some mindmap-software have roll-up checkboxes that automatically show you how far you have come. My mindmap might look like this once I have found a few people to help me:

Checkboxes help you remember what issues are resolved. They also give you a visual impression of what is missing.

Now I can quickly see who I am missing.

For my deliverables, I like to ask people to write a list of deliverables and save it on the project’s server. My mindmap for deliverables might look like this:

Does everyone know what to do? I keep the checkboxes open until I have coordinated everyone’s deliverables.

My mindmap tells me whether the lists of deliverables are finished or not. In other words, my mindmap keeps track if my project team knows what to deliver (not if they have delivered). Another option would be to add every single deliverable to the mindmap, but I find this too tedious, especially when there are changes. So I don’t keep track of every single document, I only keep track of the lists.

Later in the project this might change. At the final stages, I want to know how far we have come, and I will ask about progress for every single item. I might use a mindmap for this, but usually I just use the lists of deliverables and add a “percentage finished”-column.

I hope the examples above inspire you to give mindmaps a try for project management. Obviously you don’t have to be a project manager to benefit. Whenever you have to juggle several issues at once, mindmaps can be useful to give you a bird’s eye view and help you focus.

I would like to show you another potential.

Mindmaps for clearing your head

In spring 2020, I was overwhelmed. The project was huge, and extremely complicated. I had only been in the company for 6 months and a lot was still new to me. The organization wasn’t clear. There were issues with the authorities and the clients. Serious issues that cost millions of euros.

Corona hit like a freight train. Working from home was no joke. My team was not used to electronic communication, so I had to spend my whole day answering emails and talking on the phone. Back-to-back Teams-meetings constantly. My family was home as well, yet I hardly saw them. At one point, I left the room that I used for an office and went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. The coffee machine was turned off. I left the kitchen and went back to the office. My wife asked me what I was doing. “I am getting coffee” — “but you didn’t get coffee” — “the machine is turned off” — “so switch it on” — “I don’t have time to wait for the machine to turn on”. Something was very wrong. When I heard myself say that I didn’t have time to wait for the coffee machine to turn on (which takes about 20 seconds), I knew I had to do something. The symptoms were already there. Bad sleep, forgetting things, getting annoyed at details…

The next day I didn’t work on my project at all. To hell with the 100+ urgent emails, they would still be urgent the day after.

I spent several hours creating a huge mindmap of all the things going through my head, professional and private. There were so many things going on, I could hardly believe it. But something changed.

Before I created the mindmap, there were all these issues in the back of my head, constantly disturbing my focus. Now they were on the screen in front of me. I could easily prioritize them, and make a plan of attack.

I identified the issues that I couldn’t do anything about. I contacted the relevant people in my organization and asked them to handle them — huge relief, now they were no longer my problems, and people could actually act on them.

I identified the issues that could wait, and let them wait.

Now it was much easier to focus on the important and urgent stuff, and solve issues one by one.

The biggest surprise was the amount of personal issues in my mindmap. I had focused so much on work, I had ignored the personal stuff. The mindmap helped me realize this, so I decided to work less and focus more on the personal issues.

Software or pen-and-paper?

It is easy to create mindmaps with pen and paper, and I do this quite often to organize small issues. I might make a mindmap for a gardening project or for planning Christmas.

For professional use, I prefer software. Software lets you open and close parts of your mindmap, so it helps you focus. With software, all my mindmaps are on my computer and I don’t have to carry them around. I have unlimited space on the page, and editing is much easier.

I have used several different programs. Some let you create a few mindmaps for free, and then you have to pay to create more.

Here are some things you can think about before buying a license:

• Is the license fee recurring or a one-time payment?
• Does it save your mindmaps in the cloud (onedrive, dropbox or similar?)
• Does it have an app, so you can see your mindmaps on your phone or ipad (this is less important than most people think, because mindmaps quickly get so big that you want a computer screen)?
• Does the software convert topics in your mindmap to tasks in Outlook (some software can do this, but I have never used this option)?

I hope this article helps you get a better idea of the potential of mindmaps.

Happy mindmapping!