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NovaMind provides a very powerful synchronization service for your To Do lists and Events. This allows you to use the alarms, meeting invites, synchronization, to do lists and other features available in iCal, synchronizing directly from within NovaMind, using either automatic or manual synchronization of task information. The synchronization can be set up to be either one way, so that NovaMind tasks are pushed to iCal, or to be bi-directional, so that your iCal tasks are also synchronized back to NovaMind. Some iCal synchronization features are available in the Pro edition, and some only in the Platinum edition.

To turn on synchronization with iCal, use the File / Sync With iCal… menu option. You will see a number of options as defined below:

In NovaMind Pro, you will see the following options:

NovaMind 5 Pro iCal Synchronization Options

And in NovaMind Platinum, you will see the following  options:

NovaMind 5 Platinum iCal Synchronization Options

Although there is only one checkbox difference, there is a big difference in the functionality between NovaMind Pro and Platinum.

Here is an explanation of the options:

• Synchronize topics with task information with iCal events (Platinum edition only): When this option is checked, whenever a synchronization is performed, NovaMind will synchronize any tasks you have where they have a start and end date defined in your Mind Map, with iCal Events. iCal Events are the items you see on the main calendar in iCal. If your start and end dates have the time set as 12:00 AM, this is taken to mean that the hours and minutes are not relevant, and the Events created in iCal are therefore marked as All Day events.
• Synchronize topics with checkboxes with iCal To Do items (Pro and Platinum edition): When checked, whenever synchronization is performed, NovaMind will add any topics with checkboxes to iCal as To Do items. The amount of information that is transferred is dependent on whether you are using a NovaMind Pro or Platinum license.
• Add new Event and To Do items to: Choose the calendar that you want to have NovaMind add the events to. It is often a good idea to create a calendar for your project, in order to keep your tasks manageable. If you come into the setup sheet and then decide to add a new calendar for your tasks, close the setup sheet without synchronizing, and then open it up again once you have added the new calendar, and you will be able to select it. As soon as you synchronize your Mind Map, the tasks will be placed on the calendar you had selected at the time, so if you change to a different calendar later, that will only affect new tasks.

  If you completely delete a calendar that NovaMind was trying to synchronize with, NovaMind will inform you next time you try to synchronize, and you will have to come back to the setup panel and choose a different calendar to synchronize with. If this happens, NovaMind will re-sync all the tasks with the new calendar, but if you just change calendars part way through, only the new tasks will be synced with the new calendar, unless you manually remove the old ones from the old calendar.

• Auto-synchronize before save: If you turn this option on, every time you save your file, it will update iCal with any changes you have made in NovaMind. If you don’t have this option turned on, you will have to come back to the setup sheet and use the Sync Now button to update iCal.
• Accept changes made in iCal: If you have this option turned on, then any changes you make to data in iCal will be transferred back into NovaMind. Note that if you add additional information that does not relate to data stored in NovaMind (e.g. alarms), then that will remain stored solely in iCal. Only the data relevant to NovaMind will be transferred back in. If you have this option turned off, then the synchronization is purely one way – from NovaMind to iCal, and any changes you make in NovaMind will always overwrite your iCal information – but with all synchronization, it will only affect data that relates to NovaMind data.

  This option allows for updates to data that is made live while both iCal and NovaMind are running. Normal synchronization takes care of cases where the iCal data was changed while NovaMind was not running, or the particular map was not open, but they still honor your setting, and will only copy in data from iCal if you have this option turned on.

  Note that if you change the title of the To Do item or Event, then the synchronization only transfers back the plain text, so if your topic had other formatting on it, it will be lost, and the formatting will revert back to the formatting defined in the theme you are using. For this reason, we recommend that if you are going to change the name of a task, you change the topic title on the Mind Map and let it synchronize that way rather than the other way around, if you have set custom text attributes.

  The same applies for the topic notes, which are also synchronized with iCal.

• Warn before accepting changes: If you have this option turned on, you will be asked to confirm before any changes made in iCal are accepted into NovaMind.
  

  Synchronization from iCal to NovaMind

  This applies to both the live updates from iCal, and synchronization where the items in iCal may have changed while NovaMind didn’t have that document open, and the synchronization would lead to data being updated from iCal to NovaMind.

General Synchronization mechanism

When you synchronize between NovaMind and iCal, if you have altered a topic in a way that means that it should have an iCal task associated with it (adding a checkbox, or setting a start and end date), then the To Do or Event is automatically created.

If you do something that means that the Event or To Do would no longer be required, for instance removing the checkbox, or unsetting a start or end date, then the iCal Event or To Do is removed automatically – even if you have entered other information such as attendees and alarms on the Event or To Do. Also, obviously, if you delete a topic, its corresponding iCal item will be removed when you next synchronize.

If you cut and paste a topic, or graft it from one place to another, so long as you cut and paste without saving in between, your linkage to your iCal event will be preserved.

If you copy a topic, then the original will maintain its iCal event, and the new topic will get its own one next time you synchronize.

If you add additional information to items in iCal, we do not override that in our synchronization. This can be useful where you want the base tasks in NovaMind, and want to add things such as alarms in iCal. The only time that information would be deleted would be if the iCal item was being deleted as per the rules above.

NovaMind does its best to be self-repairing. If you delete the selected calendar, NovaMind will prompt you to choose a new one, and will re-sync your tasks with the new calendar:

Choosing A New Calendar

If you delete a task or event from iCal while NovaMind is not running, NovaMind will recreate the To Do or Event when it next synchronizes. If you try to access an iCal item from the inspectors and they are not available, NovaMind automatically resets the linkage so that next time you synchronize, it will create a new item in the calendar.

To Do Synchronization

When you synchronize To Do items, if you have a Pro edition license key for NovaMind, then a To Do will be created for any topic with a checkbox, and just the checked state will be synchronized, along with the topic title and notes. If you have a Platinum license key, the priority will also be transferred, and if you have an end date defined for the task, that will be transferred as the due date for the To Do.

When you have a To Do synchronized with a topic in NovaMind, the “View in iCal” button will be enabled on the inspector, but only if that is the only topic you have selected:

Checkbox Inspector With "View in iCal" Enabled

Note that in the To Do items on iCal, the checkboxes are simple checked or unchecked checkboxes, so we only transfer that information – if your checkbox is in an indeterminate state, it will be transferred to iCal as unchecked. This isn’t too much of a problem, but seeing as the data on the iCal calendar is not as rich as the data in NovaMind, we are forced to adapt the data coming in from iCal. This has the side effect that if a task is in the indeterminate state in NovaMind, and you export it, and then change one of the other fields that synchronizes with NovaMind (e.g. the priority, if you are running NovaMind Platinum), and then sync that change back to NovaMind, it will uncheck your checkbox in NovaMind even though you didn’t directly change that field in iCal. This is likely a very rare occurrence, but you have now been warned! And there isn’t anything we can do to work around this.

Event Synchronization

Events will only be added to iCal when both the start and end date are defined, and the start date is not after the end date. The start and end dates, topic title and notes are synchronized with iCal.

If you don’t set the time to anything other than 12:00 AM, then all day events are automatically added to iCal.

When you synchronize your events with iCal, the view in iCal button will be enabled, but only if you just have a single topic selected. When you click it, you will be taken directly to that calendar event in iCal:

Task Inspector with "View in iCal" Enabled

Toolbar Item

There is a toolbar item available, but it’s not on the default toolbar, so if you want to show it, you will need to use the Customize Toolbar option and drag it on.

iCal Sync Toolbar Item

In yet another significant update to the capabilities of NovaMind 5 for Mac preview release, NovaMind has enhanced the capabilities of the task reporting by adding a very powerful printing option, and exports to RTF and MS Word.

You can print your tasks directly from within the NovaMind program. When you choose to print, you will see options as follows:

NovaMind 5 Task Report Printing Options

The header and footer options are almost exactly the same as the main Mind Map printing options, so we won’t go into them in detail here. Notice one item in particular though, and that is the “Print Filter Criteria” option. If you turn this option on, the report will include the exact criteria that were used to generate the report, for example:

Task Report Filter Criteria

The information included in the reports is filtered according to your filtering criteria, and sorted according to any sorting you may have set up using the column headers.

The report only includes the columns you have chosen to include in your view, and the ordering and width is dependent on what you have set up on the task reports panel. Basically, we take the things you are looking at on the screen and reproduce that as best we can in the report. If you see columns with data that is wrapped onto two lines, and you want to prevent that, you would just cancel out of the printing, and widen the column and try again. Seeing as the task column is almost always going to be wider than any other columns, it is set to take up any available space once the other columns have taken up their space.

Task Report Exports

You can export your task data to several formats by using the popup menu in the bottom left of the task reports window:

Task Report Export Formats

CSV Export:

You can export the data from your report to CSV (comma separated values). Only the data that is shown in the results table will be exported, and only the columns that you have showing at the time. The export will also honor your sort order.

CSV files can be read by many programs, including in particular spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.

Note that the specification for CSV files is very loose, and it doesn’t even have a standardized way of representing dates, so we just export the data as it appears on your screen. Most programs that import CSV files have options for interpreting things like percentages and dates, if they need to turn them into their raw data types to work with them.

RTF and Word Export

The RTF and Word export give you a table with the information, showing the columns you have selected, and with the data sorted according to your selected sort column (if you have sorted it). It also includes all the filtering criteria, just like what you get when you print it out.

NovaMind 5 has sophisticated outline numbering capabilities, unmatched in any other Mind Mapping product, which allow you to number topics in a variety of different ways.

To access the outline numbering settings, use the Children Outline Numbering inspector in the Data inspector group.

If you are using NovaMind Express, the outline numbering inspector will look like this:

Outline Numbering in NovaMind 5 Express

And if you are using NovaMind Pro or Platinum, the inspector will look like this:

Outline Numbering in NovaMind 5 Pro and Platinum

The difference is because there are more advanced outline numbering options available in the Pro and Platinum editions, which allow you different formatting options for the numbering, like using letters and Roman numerals, different separators between the numbers at different levels, and prefixes and suffixes, which can be set individually at each level.

Outline numbering is applicable for the children of the selected topic or topics, and setting the outline numbering on a parent topic can affect the sub-topics to multiple levels, and can be overridden at any level below, to give unparalleled power and flexibility in the outline numbering system.

There are two parts to the outline numbering settings – the first is where you want the outline numbering shown, and the second is the formatting of the outline numbers that are shown.

Basic Settings

• Default: this uses the default outline numbering, which may be on or off at any particular level, based on the theme, and your settings on parent topics. In most situations, the only time you would change the setting away from being the default would be if you want to explicitly turn on or off the children numbering.
• All Sub-Topics: this turns on numbering for all levels below the selected topic. Please be aware that this option can result in very long and unwieldy outline numbers like 1.5.12.6.8.23 if you have a deep hierarchy and don’t use the Restart Numbering option at all.
• Numbering Off: this will force there to be no outline numbering on the children of the topic. This option is particularly useful if you have a deep hierarchy of outline numbers and for a specific topic, you don’t want the children to have outline numbers, but for most of the topics you do want them.
• X Levels: this turns numbering on for the specified number of levels from the selected topic. Note that the hierarchy is extended by this setting, so if you want the numbering to restart instead, you would have to also turn on the Restart Numbering option.

Let’s first take a simple example of where you want to set the outline numbering to go down to two levels from the Mind Map title. You would select the title, and select for numbering to go down to two levels.

Simple Outline Numbering to 2 Levels

Now if you decided that you wanted to have these outline numbers on all but the subtopics of topic 2, then you could leave the first setting as is, select topic 2 and turn numbering off for that topic like this:

Excluding a Topic from Numbering

By contrast, if you wanted to have outline numbers on the first level only, except that on subtopic 2, you wanted an additional level, you would select the Mind Map title and set the outline numbering to  1 level, and then select subtopic 2 and set the outline numbering to 1 level:

Selectively Extending the Numbering Depth

Restart Numbering

Normally the outline numbering builds up at each level – 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc., but sometimes you want to just start the children numbering for a particular topic back to just a single number, and that’s where the Restart Numbering option comes in.

In our example, let’s set the outline numbering to all levels from the title. Then on topic 2, we’ll turn on the Restart Numbering option like this:

Restarting Outline Numbering

Custom Formatting

The table at the bottom is for adding custom formatting to as many levels as you need. The first row sets the formatting for the first level, and the second row for the second level of subtopics etc.

So for instance if we wanted to change the formatting to be lower case letters for the first level and Roman numerals for the second level, we would add two rows on the same topic where we set the outline numbering (in our example, the Mind Map title).

To add a row, click the “+” button at the top right of the table, and the second column is where you set the numbering format. To delete rows from the formatting table, select the row and press the Delete key.

Custom Outline Number Formatting

Advanced Formatting Example

The formatting options for the advanced outline numbering are more powerful than those of any other Mind Mapping software, and give you massive flexibility.

For ordinary formatting, you would not use a prefix or suffix, but would just be changing the number format and possibly separator, depending on your needs, but let’s do some “Extreme Number Formatting“!

Let’s say we wanted to have the outline numbers formatted so they said something like

“Section 2, part 3 (iv) e.6?

(where 2, 3, iv, e, and 6 are the numbers at different levels). You would do this by setting the numbering up as follows:

Advanced Outline Number Formatting

Let’s just break this down. Each format has four components:

1. Prefix: This text comes before your outline number at that level. Note that there is no space between the prefix and the number, so you will need to add a space after it. In our case, we did want a space, so we added the word “Section ” (with a space after it) for the first row.
2. Number Format: This gives you options for the type of number – numbers, upper or lower case letters or Roman numerals.
3. Suffix: what you want to come after the number – again, if you want spaces before or after the suffix, you will need to type them.
4. Separator: this is the punctuation you want between this number and the next level down, and it is only shown if there is a next level below that topic.

Just a couple of notes about the formatting above: on the second and third level, we didn’t want to have a separator, so we chose the (no separator) option from the menu. On the third level, we wanted to have a space between the previous numbering and our open parenthesis, so we typed ” (“. The fourth level required a space before the letter, so we just typed a space in the prefix, and the last formatting level is just standard formatting with no prefix or suffix.

There are many new features in the task reporting features of NovaMind 5, such as live update of data, exporting to CSV files, live inline editing of task information, and sorting of results. This is available in the Platinum edition of NovaMind 5.

You can access the task reports using the Task Reports button on the Task Settings inspector, or from the Window menu item.

The Task Reporting Panel

All the items on the report panel are updated live, so you can leave the panel showing while you edit your Mind Map, and the filtering, sorting, and data values will be updated live.

Here is an explanation of the filtering options:

• Complete: When checked, the report will be filtered based on the option beside it. Filtering by complete=Yes will show you any tasks which are at 100% complete. Filtering by complete=No will show you any tasks that have a percentage complete for the task (0% or more), but are less than 100% done.
• Overdue: When filtering by Overdue=Yes, you will see all the topics where there is an end date defined for the task, and the end date is after the date and time right now, and either there is no task % complete information for the topic, or the % complete is less than 100%.

  When filtering by Overdue=No, you will see all the topics where there is an end date defined for the tast, and the end date is less than or equal to the current date and time, and either there is no task % complete information for the topic, or the % complete is less than 100%.

• In Progress: When filtering by In Progress=Yes, you will see all the tasks that have a percentage complete of 0% or more, but less than 100%. Note the 0% – a task is not said to be in progress when you have no percentage complete, but where the percentage complete is set to zero, it is thought to be in progress because you have registered that you have started the task even though nothing concrete has been accomplished yet.

  When filtering by In Progress=No, you will see all the tasks that have no percentage complete, or the percentage complete is 100%. As per the above explanation, tasks with 0% complete will not be shown when filtering to show tasks that are not in progress.

• Min Priority: When filtering by minimum priority, all tasks with a priority greater than or equal to the specified priority will be shown in the report.
• Max Priority: When filtering by maximum priority, all tasks with a priority less than or equal to the specified priority will be shown in the report.
• Due to start in: When filtering by the tasks due to start in a certain number of days, only the tasks that are due to start after the date and time right now, and the specified number of days away will be shown in the report.
• Selected Resources: You can either choose to show the tasks no matter who is assigned to them, or you can select as many resources as you want to filter the results. When filtering by selected resources, only the tasks which have been assigned to the selected resources will be included in the report.

You can filter on as many of the different attributes as you like, all at the same time. Your filter settings are remembered in your preferences for all the left side filters, so you don’t need to set them all up again next time you start NovaMind, or work on a different Mind map.

Sorting results:

You can sort the results by clicking on any of the headers of the table to sort on that field. Note that we have implemented a special three state sorting where clicking on the table title will switch between sorting ascending on that column, sorting descending on that column, or not sorting at all. When you don’t sort at all, the results will be in the natural order of the Mind Map – i.e. the order that they would be numbered if they had outline numbers showing.

Results Sorted by Priority

Just a special note about the duration sorting: the sorting on the duration column works based on the actual length of time, so if you have a duration of 8 days and another duration of 1 week, the duration of 1 week would come before 8 days when sorting in ascending order.

Working with columns:

You can show and hide columns from your report by right clicking on the table to see the context menu like this:

Showing and Hiding Columns

Select one of the menu items to hide the column if it was showing, or to show it if it was hidden.

You can reorder the columns just by dragging them into the order you want them in.

You can resize the columns as desired. Note that the only column that will wrap its contents is the Topic / Task column.

Editing data:

With the exception of the actual name of the task, all the other columns are editable.

This means that you have full editing of the task information for all the displayed information.

For some data, like the priority and percentage complete, editing is in place:

Inline Editing of Task Data

For the more complex data, we need special popup editors to edit the information:

Popup Editors for editing Task Data

Editing Start Date in the Reports Panel

The same editing and value rules apply here as apply if you are editing the values in the inspector.

Note that if you have filtered your results and your edited data means that your topic no longer complies with the filter conditions, the edit will be applied, and the topic will disappear from the results. For example, if you were filtering on tasks that were complete, and you changed the percentage complete to be 95%, then it would no longer be displayed in your report.

Exporting your data:

You can export the data from your report to CSV (comma separated values). Only the data that is shown in the results table will be exported, and only the columns that you have showing at the time. The export will also honor your sort order.

CSV files can be read by many programs, including in particular spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.

Note that the specification for CSV files is very loose, and it doesn’t even have a standardized way of representing dates, so we just export the data as it appears on your screen. Most programs that import CSV files have options for interpreting things like percentages and dates, if they need to turn them into their raw data types to work with them.

NovaMind 5 for Mac introduces many enhancements in handling of resources, including two way integration with Address Book.

Resources refer to people, equipment, facilities, or anything you may use for tasks, but in most cases, they refer to people. Resources are available in the Platinum edition of NovaMind.

To use resources on your Mind Map, you must create a pool of resources which you can assign to topics.

You can create resources in a number of different ways:

1. Click on the “+” button at the bottom of the inspector. A new empty row will be created, and you can edit the name and initials for the resource, or
2. Click on the address book button at the bottom of the inspector. A people picker will show, populated with all the people and groups you have in your address book, like this (only less blurry ):
   

   The People Picker

   You can use the search at the top to filter the records you see, and select as many of the people or groups as you would like to add, and then use the “Add Selected Groups” or “Add Selected People” to add the people you want. If you select multiple groups and some people are in more than one group, they will still only be added to your resources once, or

3. You can also drag resources directly from the Address Book application on to the resources inspector. In order to do this, you need to have the Address Book application running and visible and have NovaMind as the active application, and drag from the Address Book to the resources inspector without switching to the Address Book application (because the inspectors are set up to hide on application deactivation).
4. You can drag VCards in either from the file system or more commonly from mail messages. Note that there is no checking for uniqueness of VCard entries, or their linkage to any existing Address Book entries. Therefore, if you are likely to want to do a number of things with that resource, you would in most cases drag the VCard to Address Book, and then drag the person from the Address Book to NovaMind, to create a unique reference to the resource.

Once you have your resources there, if you have created them from Address Book addresses, you will see an address book icon beside them. If you click on the icon, the person’s record will be opened up in Address Book.

Resources, with Address Book icon

Note that when you add people from your address book, the initials are generated automatically, and there may be duplicates if you have forenames and surnames starting with the same letters. You can edit what is displayed in NovaMind without affecting your address book record, or breaking the link to the address book. Initials can be longer than two letters if you like, but the intention is that they are kept short.

You can sort your resources by name or initials, in ascending or descending order, by clicking on the table headers.

Resources are created on a document wide basis, so you can use them on multiple maps in the same document without having to create the resources again.

You can assign your resources in a number of different ways:

1. Select one or more topics, and use the check boxes to assign them to the selected topics, or
2. Select one or more resources in the inspector, and drag them to the topic you want to assign them to, or
3. Find the people (or groups) you want to assign in your Address Book application, and drag them on to the topic you want to assign them to. Note that if any of the people you drag on to the topic did not already exist in your resources, then they will both be added to your resources, and immediately assigned to the topic. If they already existed in your resources, they will just be assigned to the topic you dropped them on. If you have edited their name or initials in NovaMind, these settings will be preserved. This makes for a very powerful way to create resources and assign them directly from your address book.

When you have resources assigned to topics, you will see their initials displayed below the topic, along with any other task related information, prefixed by the letter R.

Task Resource Information on the Topics

If you do not have initials defined for a resource, the full resource name will be shown on the topic. We recommend using initials to reduce the space required.

When you mouse over the resources section of the information panel, you will see the full names of the resources as a tooltip like this:

Resources Tooltip

If you have multiple topics selected, and some of the resources are assigned to only some of the selected topics, then the checkbox will show in the indeterminate state:

Multiple Selection and Resources

In this case, Aileen and Galor are assigned to only one of the two selected topics. Checking or unchecking the boxes will affect all the selected topics.

Note that you are likely to often want to work with both task and resource settings at the same time, in which case, you would  select one of them and then Command+Click the other one in the inspector so you can see them both at once:

Selecting Multiple Inspector Panels

You can delete resources by selecting them in the resources inspector, and clicking the “-” button at the bottom of the inspector.

If you are removing resources which are assigned to any topics, you will be prompted for confirmation like this:

Deleting a Resource that is Assigned

So you can see exactly which topics that resource is assigned to. If you confirm deletion, they will be both unassigned and completely removed from your resource list.

Task information has just been added to the preview of NovaMind 5 for Mac. This article shows you what it does and teaches you how to use it.

You can put detailed information about tasks on the topics using the Task Settings of the Data inspector. This is available in the Platinum edition of NovaMind.

Task Information Inspector

The settings on the Task Settings panel affect what is shown on the Mind Map – for instance, the settings above would show like this:

Task Information Display

Priority:

• To set the priority, either adjust the slider, or enter the priority number in the text field, or in the text field you can use the up and down arrows. You can have priorities between 1 and 9.
• To make it easier to notice the differences, the different priorities are shown in different colors.
• To remove the priority indicator, move the slider all the way to the left, or enter 0 (or nothing) in the text field.

% Complete:

• The percentage complete is shown as a pie chart on the topic, with the green portion being the amount already complete, and the red portion being the amount still not complete. Percentage complete can be between 0 and 100.
• To set the percentage complete, you can either use the slider or enter a value in the text field. In the text field, you can also use the up and down arrow keys to increase or decrease the value.
• When you move your mouse over the pie chart on the Mind Map, you will see a tooltip showing you the exact percentage complete, so you can easily see the information even if you don’t have the topic selected.
• 

  Start Date Entry

• To remove the % complete indicator, either move the slider all the way to the left, or type in the number -1 in the text field, or enter a blank value in the text field (0% complete shows at an all red pie chart).

Duration:

• There are two parts to the duration: the amount and the unit. You can set the amount by either typing the amount or using the up or down arrows in the text field. Set the units using the popup button.
• At the right end of the row is a calculator. This is enabled if you have a start and end date defined, and when you click it, it will use the difference between the start and end date as the duration of the task. The duration may not be the difference between the start and end dates in all cases, for instance, where you have a task that has a start date and finish date a fortnight apart, but only 6 days of that time are actually spent on the work, you may want to record the work duration as 6 days instead of 14. When the duration is calculated, the system tries to work out the most appropriate units for the amount of time. If you want to use different units, you will have to change it manually.
• The duration is displayed as part of the information panel just below the left of the topic, after the letter D. If you are using a non-English language, and D does not mean “Duration” to you, you can see the full localized duration wording in the tooltip at that point.

Start and End date:

• The checkboxes beside the start and end date can be checked to indicate whether you want to record the start and/or end date for the topic. The start date is shown on your topic beside the letter S and the end beside the letter E.
• When you check the checkbox, today’s date will be entered into the field, with the time at 12:00 AM. The time 12:00am is used to denote there being no specific time associated with the setting, and the display on the topic will not include minutes or seconds. If you have any other time on the topic, then the time will be shown on the topic like this:

• 

  Date Selector Popup

• The order of the date components is automatically localized according to your system preferences. The date format to show the date on your topic is using the Short format as defined in your system preferences. If you mouse over a date displayed on a topic, you will see a tooltip with the full date in the Full date format style, like this:

• 

Multiple values:

It is very important when you are dealing with project data that you know about the applicability and accuracy of the information you are seeing on the user interface. If you have multiple topics selected, it is clearly impossible for us to show a slider or text field or date picker with two values at the same time, so we have always shown value for the last selected topic, but now we make it absolutely clear on the user interface that you have multiple values selected.

This is done by putting a special prompt at the top of the inspector, and a colored background behind the specific items where there are multiple values, like this:

Task Inspector with Multiple Selection

So at the top, you see the key to tell you that that shape means that there are multiple values in the selected topics. Both the selected topics have the same priority and start date, but different % complete, duration, and end dates.

The controls are still active for the items where there are multiple selections, and when you change a value for one of the settings, it will set that value for all the selected topics.

Notice also that there is a dependency for editing the end date on there being an end date specified for both the selected topics, so for the dates, if you have a date specified for all the topics, but they are different dates, then you would see the checkbox checked, and the date would be editable.

NovaMind will shortly be introducing Link Lines to NovaMind 5…but they will be about a million times better (at a rough estimate) than NovaMind 4, or any other Mind Mapping application for that matter.

Link lines are lines that denote secondary relationships between topics. Of course, you have the hierarchical format that really defines what Mind Maps are, but often you need to show secondary relationships in some way.

In NovaMind 5, you will be able to easily create straight line links between one topic and another (or floating topics, or attached shapes, or callouts), but also you will be able to create arbitrary curves.

Here is an example of the straight lines, in this case between some floating topics:

There are two ways of creating curves. You can click on the start topic (or shape or floating topic or callout), and then click at each place you want the curve to go through, finally clicking on the topic you want to finish on, and the curve will be created.

The other way of creating a curved link line is to drag a curve from the start to finish like this:

First, you drag the curve, which looks like this:

And as soon as you have finished, the program automatically smooths it like this:

But you are not limited to just creating a curve. You have full editing capabilities. When you select the curve, you will see editing points like this:

You can drag the points around to alter the shape of the curve, or remove points, or add points as required. For those who really like to fine tune the curve, you can even access Bezier path editing points, giving the ultimate control. The path automatically resizes itself when either end is moved.

You also have control over the drawing aspects of the link line: it supports automatic coloring, theme colors, 25 different dash patterns, and 30 different types of line terminators, which can be attached to the start and end of the line.

All in all, a very flexible and powerful system. This will be available in the Windows version of NovaMind 5 within the next couple of weeks, and will be added to the Mac version a little later on.

NovaMind 5 sees the introduction of a completely new media library with new, higher resolution images. An update to the Windows version of NovaMind 5 has been released, which allows you to add background textures to the mind map canvas as well as to topics and boundaries.

Along with the updated software NovaMind released a significant update to the media library, which adds over 70 new images.

Just changing the background texture image for a mind map can change the whole look of the mind map.

One of the key things about NovaMind is the automatic coloring of the text – as you can see, the text is automatically changed to be white on a dark background and black on a light background. This feature is unique to NovaMind, and makes it easier to create great looking Mind Maps.

Here are some examples (click to expand):

Note that you can get even more interesting effects by adjusting the translucency of the texture and having different canvas fill colors showing through.

Here is another video about NovaMind 5 – this one deals with topic editing and resizing, and image placement and resizing. Enjoy!

More information about NovaMind 5 is available at http://www.novamind.com/features/nm5.php

 

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Last week, Chuck Frey posted an article on the Mind Mapping Software blog, entitled 8 little-known things you can do with NovaMind, which I recommend you read…and I thought I would give you some bonus ideas here too.

These apply to NovaMind 4 only (NovaMind 5 has a significantly improved user interface).

Here are your 6 bonus NovaMind Mind Mapping tips:

1. Sidebar Customization in Windows: Show the sidebar with the image library, adornments, notes etc by clicking on the relevant icon at the bottom right of the window. Resize the width to your preference. Hide it away by clicking the X in the top right corner of the panel.
2. Palette Options on Mac: Drag the palettes to reorder them, minimize them using the “-” button, flip them using the arrow icon at the top right of the palette to see the advanced options. In the Pro and Platinum editions, drag them off to become floating windows, stack them to connect them as a single floating window, click the “x” button to close the floating palette and return it to the palette panel. Hide the palette panel completely by using the minimize triangle at the top of the palettes panel.
3. Mac Toolbar: Hide the toolbar by clicking the lozenge shaped button at the top right of the window. Click it again to show the toolbar.
4. Template Chooser: If you don’t want to see the template chooser when starting NovaMind, you can turn it off in the Preferences. You can still create a Mind Map from a template by using the “File / New From Template” option.
5. More Images: If you have not downloaded the image libraries, go to the supporting files page for Windows or Mac and download and install them. The image libraries will give you a huge selection of images (1,400 for Express and Pro, and 2,300 for Platinum) that you can just drag on to your Mind Map.
6. Create your own Templates: (Pro and Platinum) Save your Mind Maps as Templates so you can easily reuse them – they will then show up in the template chooser when you create a new Mind Map from a template.

I hope this helps you get more out of NovaMind. Happy Mind Mapping!

If you liked this, please share it:

I have just posted three new articles on Mind Mapping:

Discover How Mind Mapping Software Can Help You Write Essays Faster Than Ever Before

How Mind Mapping Software Can Help Improve Your Study Skills

How Teachers Can Quickly Create Lesson Plans Using Mind Maps

We have a number of other articles on the way to give you more insights into using Mind Mapping for different purposes…stay tuned.

Gideon

Mind Maps are a great way of gathering and organizing material for books, articles, theses, and technical documentation – in fact, any sort of writing.

The example Mind Maps in this video are taken from the two books: Teacher’s Guide to Mind Mapping and Business Guide to Mind Mapping, and are therefore only available as downloads when you buy the books, but you will be able to understand the concepts from just viewing the video.

When I write books or articles, I start by creating a Mind Map of the outline for the book, with the concepts I want to cover as the top level branches, and then details as necessary so that I have enough information there so that I know what I want to cover. At this stage, it is more along the lines of a brainstorming session, as covered in the video about brainstorming. Sometimes, it also includes note taking and research, as covered in the video about note taking, where I will add branch notes with excerpts of the material, and hyperlinks to the source material on the branches.

I have heard from people who use NovaMind for writing novels and short stories they tell me that they create similar Mind Maps with the main points of the story lines, and sometimes create character profiles with the physical appearance, language patterns, character traits, and personal history and relationships all mind mapped out. There seems to be a lot of variation in the way novelists approach their writing, and seeing as I haven’t yet written any novels myself, all I can do is pass on these suggestions.

So at the end of this process, you have an outline of the story, book or article, but it’s not usually grouped and ordered in the way you want it for the finished work. So how I approach the organization process is that I graft the branches so that the main concepts and supporting concepts are arranged as branches and sub-branches.

This gives me an idea of the size of each area of information. At the same time, I’m thinking about the order of the information so it is presented in a logical progression and the information is being introduced in order, building on the previous information.

Now I group it into chapters, and for ease of understanding, I keep each chapter to about 7 main points, because people can on average hold 7 concepts in their short term memory at once, and that’s a comfortable number to work with. Sometimes I’ll go up to 9 main points where necessary, but try not to go beyond that because there is a high likelihood of inducing information overload in the reader.

This may sound like qute a few steps, but in fact this process is usually pretty quick, and you will have the outline and overall content organized in very short order.

The next step, if it’s a book rather than an article, is to use the New Map from Branch function to take each chapter and create a Mind Map for that chapter. If your overall Mind Map had detailed information on it, you would remove the detailed level information and just have the main points on that Mind Map so that you can use it as an overview of the book.

Now for each chapter, you have your approximately 7 main points, and you extend add as many child branches as you need to cover the main points, which will become your headings and subheadings in the text, and then add the body text to each branch.

Of course, being in Mind Map format, you are not constricted to write sequentially. You can add the body text in any order you like.

When you are ready, you can export the Mind Map document with all the chapter Mind Maps into Microsoft Word format, and all the branches and sub-branches will come out as outline levels within the document, and the branch notes will come out as body text, so you can easily apply MS Word styles to the document to format it nicely, and also you will be able to generate a table of contents from it directly.

But in doing this, you are losing the power of Mind Mapping for your readers, so what I do is spend a few minutes on the layout of the Mind Maps and then export them as PDF images and then embed them into the document, with the overall outline Mind Map at the start of the book as another form of table of contents, and then at the start of each chapter, I have the chapter Mind Map which shows people the main points that are covered in that chapter.

I try to make them visually interesting by having different background colors and different styles included in the Mind Maps, but at the same time, if there is something related across chapters, I’ll use the same image in both places so you have the visual connection. Our brains love color and flow, and having different shapes and colors makes them both visually appealing as well as memorable, while the structure makes the information content easily understood and remembered too.

If the book is the type where you want people to take notes, you can include a blank Mind Map at the end of each chapter with just the main branches there so people can make their own notes as they go.

Having the Mind Maps in the book means that when a reader returns to the book later, they will be able to just take a quick glance at the Mind Map and instantly recall the content.

So using Mind Maps can dramatically speed up the writing process and at the same time lead to a much higher quality of output, and completely avoid writers block, because you have the structure in place right from the start and can work on the content in any order, and if you get stuck at all, you can just use the techniques we covered in the brainstorming video for coming up with new ideas which get your thinking going again.

I just can’t imagine writing a book without using Mind Mapping now – it would just be so slow and tedious! So get stuck in to your next writing project using the power of Mind Mapping.

 

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When I am talking to people about NovaMind, very often they ask what it is, and if I say that it’s Mind Mapping software, they say “ah, brainstorming!”, with a look of enlightenment on their faces. While brainstorming is not equal to Mind Mapping, brainstorming is a technique for generating ideas that dovetails in very nicely with Mind Mapping, so I usually agree with them…and then proceed to show them all the other things Mind Mapping is good for too.

So, enough of the background – all the Mind Maps shown in this video are available at:

http://www.novamind.com/connect/nm_documents/315

The video mentions the Suggesterator™, which is a free plugin for NovaMind which you can download for Windows from http://www.novamind.com/download/windows-support.php and for Mac from http://www.novamind.com/download/mac-support.php

The video also mentions iBlueSky Mind Mapping for iPhone and iPod touch – you can find out more information about this here: http://www.novamind.com/ibluesky/

And without further introduction, here is the video:

Brainstorming is a great way of solving problems and coming up with new ideas. It allows you to examine the problems from outside the boundaries of normal thinking, and understand the issues and root causes, and come up with alternative solutions. Brainstorming can also be used for impact analysis and decision making, as I have mentioned in other videos.

In the project management context, you can brainstorm from the objectives and goals down to the tasks to explore new ideas, possibilities and alternatives. It gives us a much more understandable and complete plan than what you would get if you just stuck to task level planning.

Brainstorming can be great for team building where you have shared discussions, and also for individual ideation, and has the benefits of improving initiative and innovation within an organization or individually, as well as improving quality and profitability, efficiency and morale.

The basic concept behind brainstorming is to capture ideas as quickly as possible so that you get past the judgment that you typically use to assess ideas before recording them, and instead we want to capture the ideas as they occur assuming no money, time, resource or any other constraint, and without judgment, building on ideas as you think of them as well as pushing yourself to think in new directions. The concept is that out of quantity comes quality – there will be great ideas in amongst the many ideas you throw out there.

As you think of the ideas, you record the keywords on branches – at the moment, you don’t care where you put the branches, because you can graft them elsewhere later, but if it isn’t slowing you down, you might like to do some high level grouping by putting some of the main branches in place and adding related ideas as sub-branches. In order to keep up with the recording of ideas, in NovaMind you have the BranchStorm™ system which you can turn on in the Windows version of NovaMind by right-clicking while you are editing text, and turning it on in the context menu, and if you are using the Mac version, you can show the tool palette from the Window menu and then click on the lightning bolt icon to turn on BranchStorm™. With BranchStorm™, you just press return after each idea, and the sub-branches are automatically created and you can keep typing.

Sometimes when you are brainstorming, you will get stuck and run out of ideas completely or you may just think that there should be more ideas related to an idea you have on the map already, but you can’t think of what it might be at the time, so let’s look at some ways of getting unstuck.

Firstly, if you think there should be more ideas related to an existing branch, or additional concepts to come from the title of the Mind Map, add blank branches to your Mind Map, because your subconscious mind hates to leave things unfinished, and will go looking for ideas to fill the empty branches. You can also take a break, and go away and either do something else or go for a walk. Doing something else lets your subconscious mind work on the problem and come up with answers when it is not under pressure. Repetitive activities like walking are particularly good for letting the thoughts surface. If you have iBlueSky on the iPhone or iPod Touch, take it with you and you can mind map your thoughts as you go. You might find that a change of scenery like going to the park or going down by the sea may lead to a different sort of inspiration where you come up with different ideas. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should make sure that you take something with you which will allow you to record ideas as you think of them rather than trying to remember them until you get back to the office.

Very often when we are thinking about a topic, we get stuck in a groove where there is a well worn track in our thinking and it is very hard to come up with new ideas. This is where the Suggesterator™ comes into play, and you can select a number of ideas related to the selected branch, and add them as sub-branches. Note that the Suggesterator™ is a free extension to NovaMind which you will need to download and install. At the top of the list are words that are linguistically reasonably closely related to the word on the selected branch, and as you get down the list, the ideas are more “off the wall” to take your thinking in completely new directions. This helps break the train of thinking and introduce completely new ideas.

Another idea is to look at similar problems in different domains and seeing if you can apply solutions that worked in that domain to the idea you are brainstorming about.

You can also ask the question “How would others solve/approach this?”. This is particularly useful when you take the point of view of other parties involved in the problem or impacted by the solution.

You can ask questions like:

• Who?
• What?
• Why?
• When?
• Where?
• How often?
• Who does this impact?

…to encourage yourself to look at the problem from a different perspective.

And finally, ask the question: “If there was another solution, what would it be?”. This is an idea that comes from Neuro-linguistics, and brings your imagination into play. It’s like saying, “I know that there is no other option, but just for a moment, imagine that there was another option, if there was another option, what would it be?”. And almost every time, your imagination kicks in and supplies another idea, and then once that door that was closing off ideas has opened up, it’s often like floodgates opening up and you start coming up with dozens more ideas.

Now, when you have recorded enough ideas, you need to reorganize them by grouping them so that you start with the overall concepts and then organize the ideas as sub-branches so that you can see the the big picture and the details. Where there are important ideas, make sure they are highlighted with adornments or images or by color etc, and also if there are ideas that are related to more than one group, you can show the secondary associations by the link lines.

Now let’s just drill down a bit and have a look at some important points for both brainstorming by yourself and in a group.

The most critical thing is to define the problem or topic clearly first. Have a look at the problem solving video to remind yourself of the four cartesian quadrants of problem definition by asking the questions:

• What is the problem?
• What is it not?
• We have this problem because…
• We don’t have a solution because…

And apply these thoughts to the topic you are examining.

Also define your desired outcome, so you know when you have achieved your objective.

Now start with the subject as the Mind Map title, and imagine that you have your “inner advisor” giving you the ideas and solutions, using the techniques we have already mentioned. Start adding top level branches and then children branches as required, without judgment or limitation, and not worrying about organization.

Stop when you have either run out of ideas and have exhausted the ideas we just mentioned for getting unstuck, or when you have collected enough ideas.

It is only after you have collected the ideas that you evaluate and organize them, and in the process you sometimes need to expand the best ideas to give more concrete detail.

Now when you are mind mapping in a group, you need some structures and methods in place to make sure that the whole process goes smoothly.

You should appoint a recorder, a session leader, and everyone else is the “panel”. You don’t want a huge group – groups of more than 10-15 people can get quite difficult to manage, and it may be best to split into different groups and then combine the ideas later, or consider different aspects of the topic.

Now the next point is very important: there have been at least 25 studies done since 1958 which all show that if you try to brainstorm with an entire group without individual brainstorming first, you end up with fewer and lower quality ideas. So, first go through the definition of the topic and the intended outcome with the participants to make sure you are on the same page, and then do the individual brainstorming and return to share ideas, making sure that you give everyone a fair say. As the ideas are mentioned and recorded on the overall Mind Map, there are going to be ideas relating to those topics come up from other participants, and these should be recorded without judgment or constraints, and also without elaboration – you just want the keywords. Then the process of grouping, culling, and elaboration is much the same as for individual brainstorming.

With this structure in place, and using these techniques, you will be able to brainstorm ideas and solutions either individually or in a group, and come up with better solutions and ideas.

 

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As we saw in the last video, there are a lot of areas of strategic planning where Mind Mapping gives you a strong strategic advantage, both in the planning process and also in explaining what the business is all about to investors, staff, and customers.

When you get to the level of business planning, some of the same theories and techniques apply, and certainly the use of things like the SWOT analysis Mind Map is very valuable as you put together the shorter term business plans, but there are a lot of other things you can use Mind Maps for at the business planning level.

There are several Mind Maps referred to in this video, which you can find at these locations:

Business planning; annual review; business plan outline

Elements of a marketing plan

Marketing plan

Mind Maps in planning

Running meetings using Mind Maps; Mind Mapped agenda

One of the significant issues with more traditional business plans is that they tend to end up as long boring documents that few people read and even fewer understand, and therefore they are ignored by precisely the people who could benefit most by following them.

By contrast, using Mind Maps for business plans allows you to create engaging, unique, memorable business plans. The color, shapes, images, and summarized nature of the Mind Maps makes them memorable and useful.

When creating a business plan, we once again brainstorm the particular areas we are interested in at the time, but this time, everything is cross-checked with the company strategic plan to ensure consistency, and to make sure that the business plan is advancing the company in the direction of the long term goals.

Just like the strategic plan in the previous video, you can create individual Mind Maps for each of the key areas of your business, and then produce a summary Mind Map which highlights the key points for use with clients and general staff, and you have the more detailed Mind Maps available to use with the staff who are employed in that particular area of the business.

When using Mind Maps for planning, it is important to use the general planning principles, as shown on this Mind Map. The first step is brainstorming, where you start at the center of the Mind Map with the subject, then add branches for each main idea or objective, and then generate the ideas for the sub-branches as quickly as you can, without worrying about organizing them at this stage.

The second stage is one of organization, culling and scoping, so that you have the main objectives at the first level, and then the supporting goals and objectives, and eventually down to whatever level of detail you need in the Mind Map. At this stage, you are comparing the things that you are putting on the Mind Map with the strategic plan, to make sure you are going in the right direction, and also looking at the feasibility and desirability of the ideas. Some ideas are not appropriate for the particular business plan being created, but may be worth keeping for later, and these ideas can be put into another Mind Map for later implementation.

From the resulting Mind Map, you refine it until you get to an action plan for each area of the business, by confirming the objectives and making sure the tasks have been identified properly, and then prioritize and schedule them.

The last, and most important part of the process is to make sure you have appropriate measures in place for tracking and feedback into future plans. These mechanisms can be built into the Mind Maps, so you record the feedback in the appropriate places on the Mind Map as the plan is put into action.

Let’s look at one area of your business planning to give you some ideas of how it could be helped by the use of Mind Maps – let’s pick marketing plans.

So you would start at the high level and perhaps draw in a Mind Map from your strategic plan and update it to match the needs of your current business plan, so we look at various aspects of the current market position, an overview of the market, do a SWOT analysis of the market, set your objectives, and then work out what strategies you are going to apply.

From there, you might create a plan for use in your detailed planning, where you address specific issues. The example Mind Map gives pretty typical issues and structures, so you might like to download the Mind Map from NovaMind Connect and customize it for your needs, but of course at the same time, it is just an example which shows you the concept which you can apply across all areas of your business plan.

So those things all relate to your business plan itself, but there are so many other areas of businesses where Mind Mapping can be used, that I thought I would mention some of them just to give you some ideas that you can work with and further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your work.

Here are some ideas around using Mind Maps for meeting planning.

Before the meeting, you can put together a Mind Map for the agenda and distribute it to the attendees. This is a good way of limiting the scope of the meeting and also showing on the Mind Map the objectives just the same way as you would for a project plan. Then during the meeting, when you have the Mind Map in front of you, it will help maintain focus and also pace the discussion because everyone can see how many topics still need to be covered. You can record the meeting minutes directly on the agenda Mind Map, recording the main points and action items as sub-branches below the items being discussed. Then at the end of the meeting, your Mind Map can be distributed as is for instant meeting minutes.

There are example Mind Maps on NovaMind Connect which give some specific tips to get the most out of using Mind Maps for your Meetings.

Another place where the clarity of Mind Maps can be very useful is for staff reviews.

Goals can be identified, the meetings that were held during the period, the issues that were encountered, and how they were dealt with, what the employee learned, the expenses, and finally the major wins, so you can end on a positive note. Now if you go into a review period with the knowledge that this is the way you will be assessed, you can make sure that all areas are covered well when you are going about your daily business, and get a fantastic review.

Hopefully this will have left you with lots of ideas and starting points for using Mind Maps in business planning and also general day to day running of businesses and doing your job better an more efficiently.

 

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Power Mind Mapping course released

NovaMind Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a free online video based course teaching you all about Mind Mapping. The course covers areas such as:

• How to take notes effectively using Mind Mapping
• How to prepare and deliver great presentations using Mind Mapping techniques
• How to create Mind Mapped to do lists
• Problem solving using Mind Maps – from simple to complex problems
• Decision making – how to make great decisions confidently, no matter how difficult the decision is
• Information and knowledge management and how to get the most out of what you know
• Project planning and management using Mind Maps
• Creative thinking and brainstorming
• How to write articles, technical documents and books using Mind Maps
• Business and strategic planning using Mind Maps
• Life management and goal setting

The course is produced by Mind Mapping expert and author of two Mind Mapping books, Gideon King. Mr King says “I am always looking at effective ways of teaching people about the power of Mind Mapping, and believe this is an effective way of making the information available to the widest number of people”. When asked whether this was just marketing for his NovaMind Mind Mapping software, Mr King responded “While I would love for everyone to buy NovaMind, so we could develop it faster and therefore help more people, my focus is very much on getting the word out there about the many powerful uses of Mind Mapping, whatever software you use. I would much rather someone was Mind Mapping using our competitors’ software rather than not Mind Mapping at all. I feel that it is my duty to spread the word about this tool that makes such a dramatic improvement to productivity and effectiveness, far and wide.”

The course is available at http://www.novamind.com/power-mind-mapping/ and is open for participants to join immediately.

About Mind Mapping

Mind Maps are diagrams that work the way people think — they organize the information in the same way our brains organize information. They make it easy to understand, remember, and communicate complex information.

Our brains like thinking in pictures. The smooth curves and colorful pictures used in Mind Mapping create powerful images for your brain to remember.

Mind Maps cater to both logical left brain thinking and pictorial right brain thinking at the same time, which makes them a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.

About Gideon King

Gideon King is a Mind Mapping and personal development expert, and founder of NovaMind software. He has written two books on Mind Mapping; the “Teacher’s guide to Mind Mapping” and the “Business guide to Mind Mapping“. He brings a wide range of experience from his training and work in both civil engineering and computer software development, as well as real world experience having worked in a number of diverse industries, lived in 3 countries, visited over 40 countries, and having completely redesigned his life in every way. This knowledge and experience shows itself in the Power Mind Mapping course, where he is able to effectively cover a wide range of topics with authority.

About NovaMind

NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 6 years, and has been available for Windows for over two years. It is rapidly gaining recognition for its many unique and innovative features and ease of use. NovaMind makes Mind Mapping intuitive and fun.

For more information about NovaMind, please visit www.novamind.com or e-mail Gideon King at gideon(at)novamind.com.

In these days of information overload, the compact way of representing ideas that is embodied in Mind Mapping is essential. You can summarize a huge amount of information in a very compact space. For us to be able to cope, we need efficient knowledge generation, management, and use.

Watch this video to find out all about knowledge management. Actually more than just knowledge management – we’ll examine how knowledge is created, what it is, and how you can use it.

We are fed with a huge amount of data all the time, and we are pretty good at sorting through the incoming data and applying our understanding of the relationships between the different pieces of data and its meaning to us, so we can turn the data into information. In this process, we delete, distort, and filter the data to fit our understanding of the world. The raw data is turned into something that is summarized, described and defined in terms that fit with the information we already know.

This massively reduces the amount of material we need to deal with, and also helps us process new data as it comes along, but still we are overwhelmed with the amount of information. We need to turn the information into knowledge, so we generalize the information and look for overall patterns that fit with our current knowledge. Knowledge allows us to have the concept of how things work, so we can develop strategies and methods that we know from experience will work. We will also be able to more easily process information because we know the patterns that we expect the information to fall into, and are able to recognize those patterns with new information.

Now if we purely operate from the level of Knowledge, we are able to implement strategies that are effective at dealing with issues, but we will not be very good at creativity or invention of new solutions.

So beyond knowledge there is what we can call Wisdom or Understanding. In order to go from knowledge to wisdom, we need to understand the principles behind the patterns we see, and the reasons that the strategies work. We recognize meta-patterns in the knowledge – patterns that define the patterns we observe. Once we recognize those reasons, it builds a framework of “truth” around our perception of reality, so we are able to form hypotheses as to what the principles are, and test them to form principles and archetypes that we can use to drive creativity, invention and coming up with new paradigms which either fit with the truth of our reality or challenge it in new ways. Having this framework of wisdom in place helps with good decision making, efficient processing of options, and creative thinking that stems from solid principles.

We thrive on being at the edge between overload on the one side and boredom on the other side. If we have inefficient ways of dealing with data and turning it into information then we will have data overload problems, and if we have inefficient ways of turning information into knowledge, then we will have information overload. What most people term information overload is actually a combination of data overload and information overload. If we get overloaded by either data or information overload, we are likely to either withdraw from the information flow and adopt a “whatever” or “I don’t care” approach, or do some sort of more mundane task or work, or blob out in front of the TV, or distract ourselves from the actual task we should be doing. In one way or another, we either cut down our input or our processing of it to avoid the feeling of overwhelm.

On the other end of the scale, if we are not stimulated with enough data, or the data we are receiving already fits with what we already know in every way, we get bored, and sometimes do things that actually sabotage situations or relationships because subconsciously we have become bored.

As you can see, our typical reactions to overload are unhelpful because we get into stuck states and just give up completely, and our reactions to boredom are often unhelpful because we sabotage things just to make life interesting.

While it is possible to go through life with very few tools and strategies to be able to cope with overload or boredom, if you live your life like that, you are likely to be very unfulfilled and accomplish very little. On the other hand, when you use the right tools and techniques to be able to deal with increasing amounts of data, information and knowledge, you will enter a “flow” state where you are able to achieve massive amounts in a short space of time, and be able to be creative and a visionary. It will both make for massive personal growth and productivity, but will also allow you to feel in control of the situation, going with the information flow.

If you feel bored, and develop the skills to be aware of that situation before you artificially introduce drama, then you will go and seek out more stimulation – more data, more challenges to tackle, and you will get the immense satisfaction of dealing with the hard problems and conquering them.

When you are dealing with a lot of data and information at once, it’s like a pipe, and if that pipe gets blocked, then all the information and data piles up behind it and very soon you have an overload situation and everything shuts down and you start using your tactics to get rid of the incoming information, or ignore it, and the whole flow process stops and you stop learning, stop gathering knowledge, stop creating wisdom, and stop being creative. One of the most common causes of this happening is when you get stuck making a decision, which is why I made the video on decision making, so you never need to have that blockage again.

But the more subtle issue is if you have more data than you can handle going in to the pipe, and the pressure gradually builds up and builds up and you don’t know how to handle it, until it eventually explodes.

Now if the knowledge is inaccessible, or difficult to understand, then it is useless to you or whoever could benefit from it. When the knowledge is readily accessible and actually used in the decision making and problem solving processes, and creative green field thinking, then you have the sum of the knowledge and experience of everyone and every situation that contributed to that knowledge at your disposal to allow you to make the most of every situation.

Of course this is where Mind Mapping comes into play.

As you gather the data, you can put it into a mind map, and as you do so, you are naturally deleting, distorting and filtering the data to become information and to match with the knowledge and information you already have. This helps deal with data and information overload. As you arrange the mind map, you are starting to group the information so that the linkages between the ideas convey meaning, and the organization is exactly the same as when information is organized in your brain. At this stage you are still operating mostly from a left brain logical perspective, but at the same time you are naturally creating an image that is attractive to your right brain too.

As you graft the branches and use the colors and branch shapes and images to indicate the commonality of ideas, you are building the understanding of the patterns within the information, and generalizing back to the root branches. This allows you to gain the level of overview of information that is necessary for it to be knowledge where you understand how it all fits together, and how your objectives are going to be met.

So you are automatically turning the data into information and the information into knowledge as you create and refine your Mind Maps. This knowledge consists not only of the keywords on the branches, but also the colors, positioning and connections the branches have, as well as the images, boundaries, task information, priorities, branch notes, and all your hyperlinks to other documents, web pages and resources. They all go to make up the sum of the knowledge contained in the Mind Map. The compactness and richness of this visual representation of the knowledge makes Mind Maps excellent knowledge management tools, so that when you (or somebody else) need the information, it is right there in an easily understood format, and with all the richness of the information and data behind it.

Having the knowledge represented graphically in this way is a great help in going the next step to wisdom and understanding where you get the picture of the principles and the underlying patterns in the knowledge, and can therefore propose archetypes and principles that can drive forward through a brainstorming process to new and innovative solutions.

Using Mind Maps in this way ensures that you can manage the volume of data, process it efficiently into information and package it up into knowledge without getting overloaded. This means you can move through wisdom to true creativity based on a solid foundation of understanding. To my knowledge, there is no other tool better suited to this process of creating and maintaining close to optimal performance than Mind Mapping.

 

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Often the number of factors you need to deal with when making difficult decisions can leave you bogged down and feeling overwhelmed and helpless. What you need is a structured way of getting all the issues out there, uncovering and designing all the options, and a system for choosing the best options to pursue.

Watch this video to see how you can find and explore options, assess their impact, and how to decide which option or options to pursue, using the power of mind mapping.

The first step is to brainstorm the potential directions very much like what we talked about in the problem solving video, but once you have the decisions outlined, there are some techniques that come in very useful for exploring the potential decisions in detail, and also techniques for deciding which option to choose, and assessing the impact of any decision.

The supporting Mind Map for this article and video is available on NovaMind Connect.

We will talk about how to use Edward DeBono’s six thinking hats to examine the possibilities from six different perspectives. For each perspective, you put on an imaginary hat that only allows you to think from that perspective. We show you the structure of this in a Mind Map made using the six thinking hats method. White represents information needs and gaps; the red hat is where you put forward intuitive ideas without needing to justify them; black is where you are judging the ideas harshly and exercising caution; yellow is logical reasons why this will work; green is alternatives and proposals; and blue is the big picture. You can read the full details in Edward’s book called “Six thinking hats”.

Next is PMI, where you consider a concept from the point of view of positive or Plus aspects, negative or Minus aspects, and Interesting things about the proposal – things that are neither positive or negative, but instead have some interesting aspects to them. This is a slight variation on the listing of advantages and disadvantages which was propounded by Plato and Benjamin Franklin.

One really useful way to use this is by creating a Mind Map where the first level branches are each person or group affected by the decision, and their PMI reaction to the option you are considering. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine how they would feel about it, or survey them to find out for sure.

Another thing that you can factor in to the assessment is what is called a force field analysis, where you put the proposed change in the middle of a Mind Map, and on the left you have the forces for change, and on the right you have the forces against change. This is again a variation on the advantages and disadvantages lists, but is specifically directed at the environment of the problem.

These techniques allow you to generate different options and explore the potential decisions thoroughly, but what about actually making the decision?

Actually you are likely to find that the thorough exploration of the options makes the decision easy, but assuming it’s a difficult problem you still need to have tools to be able to choose the best option.

Often you need to narrow the list of options down, and you can do this by using the Pareto principle which in this context means that 80% of the benefits come from changes to 20% of the factors. This can be really helpful if you have a lot of options which could feasibly be implemented. To use this system, rank each of the options, and choose the top 20% of the options to implement. You can do this using the priority markers if you are using the Platinum edition of NovaMind. Otherwise, you can just number or color code or arrange the branches to indicate the ranking.

Say you were trying to increase sales of your products and you had listed a number of things you could do to increase the number of leads, increase the conversion ratio, increase the average sale, increase the number of transactions and increase the margins. Now you rank the options, and start by implementing the top 20% of the items, and it is likely that you will increase your sales 80% as much as if you had just blindly implemented all the options, and at a much lower cost and amount of effort.

A refinement on this method is to also include a cost benefit analysis in your assessment of the options. You can create a branch for the costs and another for the benefits, and if there are other things you need to consider like short term and long term impacts, and risk factors, these can be added in to the assessment. In order to make it more objective, it can be useful to have things like the assessed probability of success, overall benefit, risk factors, and preferences used as factors in a formula to give a better rating to each option.

But what if you have a number of options that still look good and you need to choose one to implement? You need a technique for selecting the best option.

Start a new mind map with the decision you need to make in the title, and for each solution or option, create a first level branch. In some cases the result will be an outcome, and in some cases it will be another decision that needs to be made. If the result of making a decision is that you need to make another decision, then add the options for that decision as child branches, and continue until you get to every branch representing a decision producing an outcome. In the video we use an example Mind Map where, we have a decision as to whether to do advertising or start an affiliate program, and the decision to do advertising leads to another decision as to whether to use Internet or Print advertising.

For each possible type of outcome, add a child branch. In most cases, just two or three outcomes will do, to indicate either success or failure, or optimistic, neutral, and pessimistic outcomes.

Now for each of the possible outcomes, give it a value which makes sense within the domain. In the case of a monetary benefit, like increasing sales, it will be dollars, but in other areas, you might have to assign arbitrary values to the relative value of that outcome. Next, assign a probability to each of the possible outcomes, representing the likelihood of that outcome happening, so that the total adds up to 1.0. For each option, multiply the likelihood by the value, and add them all together at that level. This is the value of making that decision. Now subtract the cost of implementing that decision, and you are left with the beneficial value of that decision. Choose the largest net benefit to implement. In this case, clearly creating an affiliate program is the best thing to do.

This is of course easier to understand when you see it in the video.

This works well if you have the factors reasonably well defined, but if there are complex subjective elements to the decision, you will need to use what is called a priority vector as a multiplier for each category. This is basically a way of weighting the factors that are more important in your decision. To work out the priority vector, we need to briefly switch over to a spreadsheet and add a row and a column for each category you are assessing, then for each square in the matrix, assign it a value according to these options:

• Equal importance => 1
• Somewhat more important or better => 3
• Definitely more important or better => 5
• Much more important or better => 7
• Very much more important or better => 9

…and if it is less important, then use the reciprocal value, for instance if it is definitely less important then you would use the value 1/5. Of course when something is compared to itself it is the same, so the values are always 1.

The video example shows how to calculate the weighting for each thing that has a subjective weighting, and then apply that to the actual values for each option that is being considered, as well as combining the weighting with the beneficial value of each option.

This turns the uncertainties and subjective assessments into a formula that can be applied to give a decision that reflects all the relevant facts, probabilities of success, and the more subjective inputs, giving you a definitive decision that you can use with confidence.

These mind mapping techniques take you from the tools to find options, to simple decisions and right through to giving you top of the line tools for making very tough decisions that rely on both hard facts and more subjective factors. When you use mind maps in this way, they become very powerful tools for visualizing the options and making fantastic decisions.

 

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Mind Maps are a great tool for planning and managing projects.

In this video I will show you how to plan your projects and how to use those project plans for scope management,  communicating project goals, and getting the buy-in of all stakeholders.

The earlier video on to do lists introduced you to the basic concepts of organizing your requirements using mind mapping. Now we will extend that to look at project planning specifics.

But first, let’s ask the question, “What’s wrong with the age-old standard project management packages like MS Project and Merlin?”

Well, they certainly do give you good tools to manage your projects, but they really have a strong tendency to get people focusing on the minute task levels of projects far too early in the inception phases of a project.

This means that you can easily lose sight of the main objectives of the project, or get so stuck in the details that you forget some important tasks or objectives.

But the planning for a successful project begins before that. There is a whole inception phase of the project where the relevant information is collected together and organized so that you have a clear understanding of the scope, time, cost, quality, resources, communications, risks and of course stakeholder requirements for the project.

Often this information is gathered as large specification documents which are hard to navigate around and understand the requirements, but all of these areas can benefit from the use of Mind Mapping, and you can create Mind Maps to represent each knowledge area, and have branches for the details and hyperlinks to other documents and resources where required.

As you start a project, you need to define what the major objectives are, and each one of these objectives will become a first level branch of the Mind Map, then for projects of any reasonable size these objectives get further broken down into sub-objectives that contribute to the achievement of the major objectives, or the major areas of work contributing to the overall objectives. So these become the second level branches like this. Finally it is broken down into actual tasks that must be performed, which are the leaf branches on your Mind Map.

Obviously this is flexible and you only use as many levels as necessary for your project, and for a large project, it may require more levels.

When you get down to the task level, you may want to assign resources to the tasks. This is something you can do in the Platinum edition of NovaMind. The video shows you how to create and assign resources to the branches. Of course the resources usually refer to people, but can also refer to other resources which have a limited availability, like vehicles and meeting rooms.

The video also shows you how to assign task information to the branches, including priorities, percentage complete, start and finish date and duration.

You can see how easy it is to structure your project into objectives and then go right down to the task and resource level using Mind Maps. This means that you can use brainstorming techniques to come up with the right ideas and objectives. The techniques used for brainstorming are covered in a different video.

As you go through the exercise, you will fully explore the options for the project in much more breadth and depth than what you could cover in a requirements document. Then you can do the assessment of the ideas and objectives, and make sure that the ones you want are retained, and then look at the budget and time constraints etc, and go through a scoping exercise.

Mind Maps are a great way to manage project scope because you can remove a branch or sub-branch without impacting the other branches.

This makes it easy to make sure that there is nothing forgotten in the early planning and scoping part of the project, as well as being a great tool for presenting the project to all the stakeholders.

If you are trying to get funding for a project, it makes it much easier when the project plan is drawn out as a Mind Map. Everyone can see what the objectives are for the project, how they are going to be achieved, the tasks that are required to achieve the outcomes, as well as the resources that are required. When the project sponsors see in the Mind Map all the things that need to be done to achieve their objectives, they will understand the basis for the project costs, and can make much better informed decisions on scoping and overall outcomes. This means that it is much more likely that they will accept the costings you have provided because they can see where their money is going – everyone can see clearly what the objectives are, how they are going to be achieved, and what resources are going to be required. They may also decide to take some of the main objective branches and move them to a new phase in the project so that it can be done properly, rather than trying to fit it in to an unreasonable timeframe.

But what if you need to bring someone up to speed on a project that is already underway?

Mind Maps are very useful in briefing new team members on the project. When a new team member is assigned to the project, the Mind Maps will give them a picture of the overall project goals, updating them very quickly. The Mind Maps give a graphical overview of the tasks, how they relate to each other and their importance and impact in the greater scheme of things.

The new team member can then be introduced to their individual role in the project and will be able to quickly see what their responsibilities are and how these responsibilities relate to the overall project, giving them a better understanding of what and how they will contribute to the team and the project. Often this will lead to them volunteering their skills for tasks you may not have assigned them to, because they understand that they can make a strong contribution to the project in that area.

You very quickly have their “buy-in” on the project, whether they are coming in at the start of the project or part way through. They can see exactly where they fit in, why they are needed and how they can contribute.

Now of course during the running of your project, you would use a dedicated project management package like MS Project or Merlin to handle the detailed running of the project, and you can transfer your project information to Merlin, or to any project management package that reads the MS Project XML file format (which is just about all the project management software currently available).

So as you can see, NovaMind is a great tool particularly for the inception phases of projects.

Watch the video now to hear about using Mind Maps for brainstorming requirements; scoping; time, cost and quality management, assigning resources, communicating project requirements, and managing risks. When you use Mind Mapping in this way, you will be able to manage the scope of projects better, make sure that no requirements are left out, have better communication with the stakeholders and sponsors, and have better buy in from your staff working on the project.

All these things add up to better managed and more successful projects.

 

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Mind Mapping is a very powerful tool when it comes to solving problems. In this video I will show you how you can take a structured approach to problem solving which will allow you to generate more ideas and better solutions. You will hear about the four step method of problem solving, and you’ll get a feel for how this can work for you.

The first and most important step of all is defining what the problem is. Now this may seem pretty obvious, but actually a thorough examination of what the problem is can lead to a redefinition of the problem, or turning a huge problem into something manageable, and helps get you in the right frame of mind to solve problems that initially seem overwhelming.

So the goals here are to have a narrowly defined problem that we are sure is not multiple problems, but a single well defined problem. We need to be sure that it really is the problem, and that the problem is not obscured by emotion, opinion, hidden or open agendas or anything else. It is also important to understand why it’s important to solve the problem, because this will give you the impetus to actually follow through with the process.

Now the first four ways we examine the problem are based on what are known as the cartesian quadrants, based on the work of René Descartes, and the concept was originally applied to proving a theorem – if you could prove it by examining it from all of these perspectives, it was taken to be proven true. However, we are using it in a slightly different way here, because we are using it to examine the problem it from all four of these perspectives, which will eliminate everything that is not the problem, and we will have a clear and concise grasp of what the problem really is (or at least what we believe it to be). Don’t be surprised if viewing the problem from these four perspectives completely changes the problem you are solving, or even proves that it wasn’t a problem in the first place. Often our original idea of what the problem is, is actually symptoms of the problem, and this method allows you to break through to the core problem.

The video walks you through a practical example of problem definition based on this Mind Map. As you go through the definition of the problem, you add branches to your mind map, narrowing down the definition to the core issue, but also generate some strong starting points for brainstorming solutions.

Some people also try to define the objectives and what constitutes a good solution very tightly during this phase of problem resolution. I believe this is counter-productive, because it narrows your thinking. The process we have gone through with the definition of the problem has already narrowed things down quite sufficiently.

Also, while we have been talking about this in terms of problems, I prefer to use the word Challenge, because our thinking about problems are often ones of fear and dread of these heavy things that weigh us down and hold us back, whereas challenges are things that we step up to and overcome, and feel positive about our progress. Also, this methodology doesn’t need to be about solving problems – you can use exactly the same method for identifying and going after new opportunities.

Next, the video explains the four step method of solving the problem.

Part of this process is brainstorming. Brainstorming is designed to be free from judgment, and the idea is to get as many ideas out there as quickly as possible. The concept is that quantity yields quality, and the more ideas generated, the more solutions you will find. This is the opposite of linear thinking, where you arrive at one solution and then stop thinking.

With brainstorming, you want to generate as many ideas as possible just throwing them out there and recording just the keywords on your mind map so you can keep up – maybe using the BranchStormâ„¢ feature of NovaMind. To get things started, you have probably generated some ideas or categories of ideas just from the problem definition exercise. Add those categories to your Mind Map, and then add sub-branches for specific ideas. Think from the perspective of no resource constraints – assume you have infinite money, staff, time and expertise available at your disposal. You can pull it back to reality later.

If the ideas come too fast to organize them as you go, just get them down there and organize them later.

But what if you run out of ideas?

Here are some ways of getting the creative juices flowing again:

• Get up and go for a walk, or do something else completely different and come back after half an hour
• Add blank branches to some of your categories and ideas, and your subconscious will work on ways to complete these branches by supplying ideas – you can do this before going for your walk, so your subconscious has been triggered to search for specific ideas
• Use the NovaMind Suggesteratorâ„¢ to come up with new words and associations, and build your ideas from there. Choose some of the words from near the end of the list of suggestions where they are more “off the wall” suggestions, and work out connections with the problem
• Think of ways of “improving” an existing solution or proposed solution
• Ask the question “If there was another solution what would it be?” – this tricks your brain into supplying another idea when you don’t think there is one, and once you have come up with one more idea, the flow of ideas starts again.
• How would other people solve this problem? People from another country, your competitors, your ancestors, children, etc.
• What limitations on your thinking have you imposed? Although you are supposed to be brainstorming from the perspective of no constraints whatsoever, your mind is probably so attuned to judging ideas and limiting what you come up with as potential solutions, that you need to ask “what other solutions are there if there are no restrictions?”. How can you reverse or get rid of those assumptions and limiting decisions. What possibilities open up when you do?

During the brainstorming, you were not judging anything. Ridiculous ideas were recorded along with sensible ones without judgment. Now it’s time to organize the information on your Mind Map into different categories, where you have a branch for each category, and the proposed solutions and ideas as sub-branches.

Remember that there are always multiple solutions to problems.

So check what is going to be feasible, what fits with practices and policies, or where changing those practices and policies would be a better solution. Make sure you take into consideration the effects of your proposed solution on everyone involved, and whether the idea really does constitute a solution to the problem. If a solutions looks ridiculous, ask how you could accomplish the same thing in a different way, or which parts of that idea can we actually use.

Make sure the solutions fit with the facts of the situation, and judge the impact on both the problem and anyone and everyone affected. Every potential solution will have pros and cons – make sure you think about that as you make your decision as to which of the proposed solutions to follow first. Make sure the cost and time to solve the problem is worth it. Which solutions are you best equipped to implement? What are the short term and long term benefits of each solution? How do the solutions fit with your time and resource constraints?

Record further details under the preferred options on your Mind Map, such as time frames and the steps involved in achieving the desired outcomes.

The video tells you how to gather the required information and take action on implementing the chosen solutions, and follow up to make sure that the things you did actually solved the problem.

So, watch the video above if you haven’t already done so, and I wish you all the best with using NovaMind to solve all your problems and generate new ideas and solutions.

 

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Different people learn in different ways. NovaMind can make a big difference to your understanding, memory and learning because the notes you create suit your personal learning style.

Watch this video to see how to use Mind Maps in this way.

To be effective at note taking, it is best to first prepare by creating a Mind Map that shows what you already know about the topic. Add to your Mind Map the things that you think are going to be covered in the presentation or study. Next identify the things you want to find out and add those topics to the mind map so that your brain is focused and subconsciously looking out for that information.

Then during the talk or study session, note the ideas as they arise. Where you can, associate the ideas where they belong on the Mind Map, but if the information is coming too fast for that, just get the keywords down and you can organize it later. Remember that the most efficient storage of information on a mind map is through using keywords and the association between the keywords to represent the ideas.

Use the prior knowledge you had to hook in the new information, as well as identifying the new ideas and making sure you get the association between the ideas reflected in the structure, because this is how your brain remembers information.

Identify the gaps in your knowledge so that you know what you don’t know, and can ask the right questions to get that information. Work out what is missing. What don’t you know? What else do you need to understand and act on the information, and where can you get that information?

After the presentation has finished or the study session is over, review the information you have gathered, summarize it and reorganize it so that the hierarchy makes sense to you. If you need to memorize it, do the one hour, one day, one week, one month and one year scheduled reviews, as well as creating a copy of the Mind Map without looking at the original so that you can make sure that the information has really sunk in.

When you use a mind map, note taking feels compact and complete. An entire class or lecture can be seen at a glance. It’s an incredibly effective way to study, review, understand and memorize information, as you’ll see once you begin using NovaMind in this way.

 

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