NovaMind News

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!

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NovaMind is moving office this weekend and Monday. We will try to keep disruption of support services to a minimum. The web site will continue to be fully operational during our move.

With the growth in the number of users of NovaMind (over the last 9 months in particular), and the massive interest in NovaMind 5, it’s time for us to move to bigger offices to cater for additional staff as we continue to expand. With the new office, and new procedures to handle our international staff, we should be able to grow the company to at least 5 times the current size using the new office as our home base. We’ll be gradually increasing our staff numbers in the short term, as we can’t bring too many people on right in the middle of the ramp up to NovaMind 5 without negatively impacting the delivery of NovaMind 5, but following the release of NovaMind 5, we expect to be growing rapidly.

The new office is a brand new office building, so we have had the privilege of designing the entire layout exactly the way we wanted it, and we’re very excited about moving into it. Here are some pictures during the construction. They say it will be ready by Friday - I hope so!

2009 is definitely “the year” for NovaMind, with exciting new developments happening every week. It’s been over 7 years of really hard work to get it here, so it’s very rewarding to see it finally really get past the point of critical mass and be heading into a massive growth phase. I guess I was a little worried about the “global economic meltdown” everyone is talking about, but it appears that companies and individuals are actually realizing that they need to work smarter and more efficiently, so we have seen strong sales throughout the economic turmoil.

And of course, we couldn’t have done it without you, our customers who have told your friends and colleagues about NovaMind, and have bought NovaMind and upgraded as we release new versions.

You are just seeing the beginning of what NovaMind will become, as I reinvest the profits into building better software, support systems and services for you.

Laurent Coussirat, President and Founder of the group, explains :

“As a manager of 3 companies, I was first a simple user of Novamind software, needing to improve my efficiency, organization and communication. As a consultant, I was also using Novamind for brainstorming, interactive meetings, and innovative presentations.

So much convinced by those useful tools, I decided to distribute them in Europe through a new shop online specially designed and dedicated to NovaMind software : www.store-become.com.

We have been working a lot on the design of the store website, to make it attractive, clear and user friendly, as well as creating a secure area where a user can log in and see details of their orders, license keys, and invoices at any time, instead of just receiving them once by email.

We created also a new department inside the company, with value added services focused on :

• Creativity methods and tools
• Map design on demand
• Mind mapping approach
• Training
• Coaching

Novamind software has changed the life of our team inside the company, and is changing, more and more, the life of our customers ! We push hard to promote Novamind solution and our value added services on the European market.

Thanks to Gideon King and his team for those amazing tools. We wait now for the fantastic version 5 ! ”

This is a version of the Mind Map they have created for their home page showing some of the main benefits of using NovaMind:

And here is a Mind Map created “on demand” for a customer who needed to do a business presentation on their commercial strategy for a chain of jewelry stores:

Laurent mentions that there are a number of other templates on the www.store-become.com web site, and more to come each month.

We are very happy to welcome Become Partners as a NovaMind reseller.

Find out how easy it is to become either an affiliate or reseller on the NovaMind web site.

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Juan Gómez-Jurado uses NovaMind Mind Mapping software to write his books…and apparently it is working out rather well for him, seeing as he has sold over a million copies of his book “God’s Spy”, and has also received over half a million dollars for his last book.

He says that NovaMind is essential for his writing process, and is very much looking forward to NovaMind 5, which will be released in September/October. In his own words:

“For mind mapping my last novel, I used Novamind 4, and I want to thank you. Novamind 4 was amazing, esential throughout the whole process.

I’m starting to mindmap my next novel, and would love to do it on Novamind 5.

I’m gonna buy the update asap…Your software is so good that I received 500K$ for my last novel. That says it all!!

And I’m really eager of grabbing Novamind 5.”

Juan Gómez-Jurado
International best-selling author
(Including “God’s Spy”, which has sold over 1 million books)
www.juangomezjurado.com

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NovaMind 5 has been completely redesigned and rewritten using the latest and best technology on both Windows and Mac platforms.

NovaMind 5 makes use of advanced features such as hardware accelerated animations and multi-core processors to give you the most advanced mind mapping application available anywhere.

This video shows you some of the user interaction within NovaMind 5 for putting images on topics, and also gives you some information about the plugin system.

More information is available at the NovaMind 5 announcement page.

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After over 2 ½ years of research and development NovaMind are delighted to announce a revolutionary new Mind Mapping product: NovaMind 5, due to ship in September/October. Further information is available at http://clk.bz/p-novamind5

NovaMind founder, Gideon King said “We saw that none of the Mind Mapping products out there were addressing the fundamental needs of mind mappers, so starting in October 2006, we went right back to the basics. With the experience of having already had a successful Mind Mapping product in the market for over 5 years, and collecting feedback from users, and conducting surveys, we had all the information to be able to design something absolutely stunning - something that does what you expect and operates the way you want it to.”

Both the Windows and Mac versions of NovaMind 5 have been built from the ground up using the latest technologies to take advantage of hardware accelerated animations and graphics processing, multi-core processors and the latest user interface designs to give the best user experience possible.

Mr King says “Everything was up for intense scrutiny, from how the Mind Maps are formatted, and how they change when you edit the topics on your Mind Maps, right down to the structure of the individual topics and the user interaction with them on every level. We took nothing for granted. Our task was simply do whatever it took to create the best Mind Mapping software out there. Period.”

Included in NovaMind 5 is a wide range of new topic shapes, providing the opportunity to create more visually rich Mind Maps. The new design elements include things such as floating topics, attached shapes, callouts, and “FlexiLine” topics which can be shaped as desired, and have the text flowing smoothly along the line. This applies also for the link lines which are used to show secondary relationships between topics - these now have a choice of over 30 terminators for the start or end of the line to indicate the nature of the relationship, as well as the ability to scale the terminator to show the relative importance of the relationships. Text labels can flow along the lines or be attached to the line at any point along the line, and multiple labels can be used per line.

There is a wide range of new topic shapes available now, allowing you to create more visually rich Mind Maps.

One of the key differentiators of NovaMind 5 as compared with any other Mind Mapping application is the sophistication of the new layout engine which both arranges the elements of the Mind Map automatically, according to a range of layout styles, but at the same time allows user control of the positioning of the topics. This is completely unprecedented technology, and makes the whole process of working with Mind Maps a natural feel.

Another unique thing in NovaMind 5 is the theme and style system which make it easy to create fantastic looking Mind Maps using professionally designed themes, design your own themes, and reuse the styling of existing elemnents of a Mind Map.

Included are a number of new ways to automatically color topics on the Mind Map, starting from any topic, allowing the user to set the coloring up in one place and have all the descendant topics be automatically colored with the desired colors.

A plugin architecture is built in to both the Windows and Mac versions of NovaMind 5, allowing for the extension of the Mind Mapping experience by third parties.

Mr King says “this is just an overview of some of the new features of NovaMind 5. We’ll be releasing more detailed information closer to the release date. NovaMind 5 is clearly head and shoulders above any other Mind Mapping application currently available, and we’re very much looking foreward to releasing it.”

Chuck Frey of Innovation Tools says “In the 3+ years I have been reporting on the world of mind mapping tools and software, NovaMind have consistently been the innovators - the ones to watch who tend to come up with the cool yet practical capabilities that no one has thought of yet. NovaMind 5 promises to deliver yet another leap in what’s possible.”

For further information about NovaMind 5, see http://clk.bz/p-novamind5

About NovaMind

NovaMind is in use in over 90 countries and is available in 10 different languages. It is being used by businesses, in education, and for personal effectiveness, for tasks such as note taking, managing to-do lists, brainstorming, research, problem solving, decision making, presentation preparation and delivery, project planning, knowledge management, writing, and many other uses. NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 7 years, and has been available for Windows for over 3 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.

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The scriptmapping functionality of NovaMind is featured in issue 15-11.04.09 issue of Filmecho on pages 36 and 37. This highlights the growing presence of NovaMind in the European screenwriting community, where it has been used to write award winning screenplays, including the one that Hector Cabello Reyes wrote to win the top professional screenwriting award in Europe.

For more information about the screenwriting capabilities of NovaMind, please the scriptmapping page at: http://www.novamind.com/screenwriting/

NovaMind, producer of Mind Mapping for both education and business use, today announced that they have joined the Memory4Teachers initiative which will provide teachers with a range of educational resources and software applications, as well as data storage on 2GB USB keys which will be given away free to 750,000 teachers across the UK.

“NovaMind have been involved in education for the last 7 years, and being able to help out so many teachers with NovaMind Mind Mapping software is like a dream come true for us”, said Gideon King, founder of NovaMind, and internationally recognized expert on Mind Mapping. Gideon King is also the author of the seminal work on the use of Mind Mapping in education, “Teacher’s guide to Mind Mapping”, and says “The effectiveness of Mind Mapping in education has been repeatedly proven, both in the effective presentation of information, memorization, study and research. Specific techniques can be used to engage visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning simultaneously, leading to much improved comprehension and retention of the information.”

NovaMind has a number of unique features which make it ideal for education, like the ease of creating visually stunning Mind Maps, rainbow coloring, flexible branches, and an all time favourite with the students; the Suggesterator, which suggests new directions for thinking based on the existing content of the Mind Map. It also has the ability to print out Mind Maps without the text on the branches so that students can fill it in with their own keywords for better memorization of the material, and again when revising, starting with the blank Mind Map structure gives visual and spacial cues which have been proven to significantly improve the recall of the actual content.

NovaMind is dedicated to providing the best of Mind Mapping software and educational resources for teachers across the UK through the Memory4Teachers system, and will also be making educational videos available to the teachers and students to further enhance their effectiveness through the use of Mind Mapping and related thinking techniques and tools.

Since 1998, RGS Media Group has been working with the public, voluntary and private business sectors providing creative and cost efficient media solutions specifically within the UK education sector. The Memory4Teachers memory sticks are an extension of this dedication to the education industry, showing yet another initiative which will help teachers significantly through the free storage space, integrated software and resources.

The memory sticks are password secure and are preloaded with a fully interactive control panel, a diary, timetable and lesson plans as well as offering support for all national curriculum subject areas. The memory sticks also provide teachers with direct access to recommended educational websites.

About NovaMind

NovaMind is in use in over 90 countries and is available in 10 different languages. It is being used by businesses, in education, and for personal effectiveness, for tasks such as note taking, managing to-do lists, brainstorming, research, problem solving, decision making, presentation preparation and delivery, project planning, knowledge management, writing, and many other uses. NovaMind has been the top Mind Mapping program available on Mac computers for the last 7 years, and has been available for Windows for over 3 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.

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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NovaMind Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of NovaMind for Windows in Spanish and French. This means that the Windows version of NovaMind is available in English, Japanese, German, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Hebrew, French and Spanish.

Gideon King, founder of NovaMind Mind Mapping software said “We are happy to have the opportunity to support our growing international family of users with Mind Mapping software they can use in their own language. While it is possible to create Mind Maps in any language using NovaMind, it is easier for users when they have the user interface available in their own language.”

The Mac version of NovaMind is available in English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, and is used widely around the world.

Mr King says “Last time I checked, which was about 3 years ago, NovaMind was already in use in at least 88 different countries. I strongly believe in the power and usefulness of Mind Mapping, so it is very pleasing to be able to help people around the world by providing software to improve their productivity and effectiveness.”

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 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.

NovaMind Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of iBlueSky integration. This allows creation of Mind Maps in iBlueSky on the iPhone or iPod Touch, which can be sent by email to anyone on the iPhone contact list, and opened directly in NovaMind for further editing and refinement.

Having iBlueSky Mind Mapping software available in your pocket on iPhone or iPod touch means that the user has at their fingertips (literally) the ability to:

• create to-do lists whilst in the moment so as to avoid forgetting anything
• take notes in meetings where there is no laptop available
• jot down ideas as they arise, and organize them
• be productive anywhere and everywhere, in those spare moments waiting in line etc.
• solve problems and make decisions using Mind Mapping techniques, at any time
• brainstorm in places where it would be impractical to take a laptop
• summarize and memorize information no matter where you are

For further information about iBlueSky and NovaMind integration, please see http://www.novamind.com/ibluesky/

Gideon King, founder of NovaMind said “We are very excited about the possibilities that this integration of NovaMind and iBlueSky brings. Late last year we surveyed our customers, and one of the most common requests for new capabilities was for integration between the Mac and Windows versions of NovaMind and an iPhone Mind Mapping solution. We feel very fortunate to have been able to develop a very close working relationship with Tenero Software, the developers of the top Mind Mapping application for the iPhone.”

At the moment, the communication is one way, but Andrew Ebling, founder of Tenero Software says “by the end of January, we should have both directions working via our import/export web service”.

There are many benefits of being able to transfer Mind Maps to NovaMind, because NovaMind allows the user to:

• Use different branch shapes and styles, and add images and adornments to branches
• Have full control over the color of the branches
• Add notes and hyperlinks to the branches
• Add task and resource information
• Give presentations directly from Mind Maps
• Export to other programs such as MS Word, Powerpoint, MS Project and Merlin
• …and have all the capabilities of NovaMind to create stunning looking and powerful Mind Maps

“We believe that the benefits for both the iBlueSky and NovaMind users are huge, and are just really glad to have the opportunity to be able to provide this amount of value to them” says Mr King.

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 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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In this video, you will discover new ways to make your message heard loud and clear. It will show you how to stay on topic and never get lost in your notes. You will be able to fully get to grips with the techniques for building and holding rapport with your audience and keeping them focused on the presentation, in a way that they will understand and remember.

In the last talk on presentation preparation, we talked about the presentation templates built in to NovaMind and also the 4-Mat system of presenting information in the order: Why, What, How, and What If.

We were talking about the overall structure of the presentation, and didn’t get into the fine details of delivery and wording, but along with the personality types that are being spoken to with the 4-mat system, there are four basic learning styles, and when you use the actual words that these people understand and resonate with, they will be able to see what you are getting at.

Those main learning styles are: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, and Auditory digital.

For the visual people, you should use words like: appear, clear, crystal, envision, focus, hazy, imagine, look, picture, reveal, see, show, view, and watch.

For the auditory people, you should use words like: all ears, harmonize, hear, heard, listen, question, resonate, rings a bell, silence, sounds, tune in/out.

For the kinesthetic people, you should use words like: catch on, feel, grasp, get a handle on, hard, harsh, sense, sensitive, solid, tap into, throw out, touch, turn around.

For the auditory digital people, you should use words like: change, chart progress, conceive, consider, criteria, decide, experience, know, learn, makes sense, motivate, perceive, plan, process, think, understand.

Using Mind Maps for your presentations makes your life really easy as a presenter, because your entire presentation is right there in front of you the whole time in a very compact form. You always have the topic at the center of the mind map, and the main points as the first level branches, so you never get lost, and always stay on topic.

It makes it easy to establish stronger eye contact and rapport with your audience because you don’t have to remember where you are up to on a huge page of written notes or shuffle your way through cue cards. Instead you have a diagram that resonates with your visual-spacial memory, so you can immediately see on the Mind Map where you are up to, and how that relates to what you have just said and what you are going to cover in the rest of your presentation.

The keywords on the branches keep you on topic without tying you to a particular way of expressing it, so you can open up and use your natural language instead of sounding as if you have read it out, as you would if you had read from traditional notes.

Because you can see at a glance how much information there is left to cover in the presentation, you can pace yourself and always finish on time without rushing, even if you do allow audience participation during the presentation.

From the audience’s point of view, they get a clearly structured presentation where they can see how it all fits together. The presentation is logical and flows so they can understand it and fit it in with their existing knowledge. They feel that you are talking directly to them because you are triggering their interest through the 4-mat structure and the learning style keywords.

Best of all, you can also print the mind map out without text on the branches and hand these maps out to your audience. They can fill in the text on the mind map during your presentation as you reveal it to them. This has a multitude of advantages for their attention and absorption of the information because they see it (great for the visual people), they hear it (auditory), they get to write it down (kinesthetic), they get to think about it and put it into their own words and extend the ideas (auditory digital). So all the learning styles are fully catered for in one place.

This is a very powerful presentation system.

So how exactly do you give a presentation from a Mind Map?

Start by stating the topic - the mind map’s title. Then go around to the innermost branches to give an introduction and tell people what to expect from the presentation.

Next, for each of the innermost branches, go through all its sub-branches to give the details for that topic.

Finally to wrap up your presentation, go around the innermost branches again and let that be your summary.

Normally you would give the presentation using the NovaMind presenter so that you can project it onto a screen and progressively reveal the branches, showing the first level branches for your introduction first, then go through the rest of your presentation delving into the detail as you go.

But if you don’t have those facilities available, you can:
* Export to PowerPoint or Keynote using the built-in mind map export tools,
* Print out the mind map to use as your notes,
* Set up the mind map on your laptop for you to see,
* Print your mind map out as a poster

The video covers these points in a bit more detail, as well as providing a number of tips which will really help you get the best result from your presentation, so watch the video now to get the full information.

 

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When uploading to NovaMind Connect, the images of the Mind Maps are generated on our server, which means that the system will only be able to render accurately the fonts that it has installed. Although all the common fonts and many others are supported (over 600 in total), previously we have not had a list of those fonts available. We now have, and you can download a PDF listing all the fonts from:

http://novamind.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/ConnectFonts.pdf

If you have a specific need for other fonts, and there are no legal issues with us hosting that font on our server, please contact the NovaMind support team, and we should be able to assist.

Thank you for your continued support of NovaMind and NovaMind Connect.

Mind Mapping your to-do list is the most common use of Mind Mapping, so we have created a video to teach you exactly how to use NovaMind to create and manage your to-do list:

NovaMind makes it easy to organize the things you need to do, and you can categorize by whatever makes sense for that particular list.

Sometimes you will want to create a to-do list that is time based, like this one which is used to organize your week. Other times, you will want to organize according to your objectives or goals.

You can use the adornments to visually categorize the tasks on your Mind Map, and you can use the colors and shapes of the branches to form visual associations too.

If there are logical associations between the tasks, you may like to indicate them using link lines.

And of course if you are using NovaMind Pro or Platinum, you are likely to want to put checkboxes on the branches. The checkboxes are three state checkboxes where the is an on, or checked state, an intermediate state which indicates that the task is partly done, and an unchecked state which indicates the task hasn’t been started.

There are two ways that the checkboxes can operate. They can be set to operate independently, or so that the state of the checkbox on a parent branch is determined by the state of the checkboxes on it’s children. This is set up using the “Automatic checkboxes” option in NovaMind. If you turn it off you can check or uncheck or partially check any branch independently of all the other branches.

With the “automatic checkboxes” option on, when the children are all unchecked, the parent is unchecked. As soon as one of the children is partially or completely checked, the parent is partially checked, because the task has been started. And when all the children are checked, the parent is checked too. If you have completed all the tasks under a parent task, you can actually click on the checkbox for the parent task and it will check all the children branches too. This is really useful if it’s been a while since you updated, and you have completed all the children tasks.

These inheritance settings also work down multiple levels of children and grandchildren branches.

One of the uses of this automatic checkbox states is that if you hide the children branches, you can still see the overall status of that task, and if you need to look at the detail, you can just expand it.

If you have more extensive task management needs like seeing the percentage complete, setting priorities, assigning resources, start and finish dates etc, then you can do that in NovaMind Platinum.

All these features mak Mind Mapping in NovaMind a very powerful way of creating and managing your to-do lists.

 

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NovaMind has just released a video detailing the value of Mind Mapping where the financial benefits of Mind Mapping are quantified, as well as going in to detail about some of the many other benefits that you can get out of Mind Mapping. This information has also been written up in a PDF report on the value of Mind Mapping in case you need to justify the expenditure of buying NovaMind to your boss.

Here is the video:

 

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