Mind Mapping For Dummies

Give it a try!

In my classes many students are initially sceptical that note-taking can actually be done with Mind Maps. They worry that they won’t be able to ‘map’ fast enough and think that it’s still easier to take notes in the old way. Others want to write it all out first and then draw a Mind Map afterwards. However, that’s not the point of the exercise: if you generate a Mind Map during the lecture or meeting itself you save yourself duplicated work and also have the information presented in a helpful way.

Therefore, I always set my students an exercise on taking lecture notes so they can see how it works. Afterwards they’re really surprised at how well they managed to generate their first lecture Mind Map.

I also invite you to present the content of a documentary in the form of a Mind Map.

Find an interesting documentary on television and, while you’re listening, try to draw a Mind Map at the same time. You can start by writing the topic of the documentary in the middle of the paper.

Figure 7-3 shows one way in which a documentary on polar bears can be structured with Mind Mapping.

This is perhaps the first time you’ve made notes on a documentary, meeting or lecture using Mind Maps. So, how did it go? Was it very hard? Practise a bit more and the technique will become second nature to you.

Figure 7-3: Polar bear notes.