The most useful context to use FreeMind, in my experience, is when planning a project.
After weeks of discussions and meetings and specifications, it's difficult to remember all the details, nuances, and dependencies that simply need to get addressed before project completion. It's simply not professional to "forget" to address a legitimate, solvable issue raised offhand in a meeting 4 months ago. It's fine if the issue isn't solved, but at least it remains in the hopper and it is known.
Simple example:
Product
- Features I'm excited to work on
-- the new customer lookup workflow
-- the Google mapping API
- Features Customer has requested
-- bulk download and emailing of electrical schematics documents
-- text ripping of PDF invoice documents
Here's the kind of discussion that would ensue as a result of the above 6 nodes:
- How come only invoices need to have their text ripped? It's no more or less trouble to rip text from 1000 documents vs 1000000 documents.
Wouldn't it be a nice feature to impress the customer with fulltext fuzzy search of all their marketing and technical documents as well? I remember that conversation - one of the engineering people asked me whether this was possible a few months back.
Hmm, this sounds like a document management system. I'm trying to reinvent the wheel. This must have already been solved.
----
As a result of asking "why X for foo here, and not X for bar there", it's easy to be comprehensive and thorough. That is the secret sauce of FreeMind. If you organize the tasks and ideas sensibly, you can apply simple questions to analyze them and generate valuable ideas and ensure nothing is missing.
The second bit of secret sauce is: I have a deadline for end of week to demonstrate text ripping features of the accounting documents. But but but - the back of my mind is screaming - but that Google mapping API is really interesting and I bet I could get it done in less than ten minutes. How cool would be to map all their customer invoices on a map of the earth?
And it would be really nice to research an open source document management system.
And, and, it would be kind of neat to see if that system had a "bulk upload/download" feature - I mean, that sounds sensible enough?
All those questions/concerns/thoughts are unfocused, de-prioritized noise. I'm not getting anything accomplished and I'm in danger of getting even less accomplished if I follow any of those thoughts.
To combat this in FreeMind, I simply create another toplevel node called "Today's focus", drag the priorities into it from the other nodes, and then fold all the other nodes so that I don't become distracted.
... this, as evidenced by this sprawling post, still requires discipline to work. :)
Simple example:
Here's the kind of discussion that would ensue as a result of the above 6 nodes: - How come only invoices need to have their text ripped? It's no more or less trouble to rip text from 1000 documents vs 1000000 documents. Wouldn't it be a nice feature to impress the customer with fulltext fuzzy search of all their marketing and technical documents as well? I remember that conversation - one of the engineering people asked me whether this was possible a few months back. Hmm, this sounds like a document management system. I'm trying to reinvent the wheel. This must have already been solved.----
As a result of asking "why X for foo here, and not X for bar there", it's easy to be comprehensive and thorough. That is the secret sauce of FreeMind. If you organize the tasks and ideas sensibly, you can apply simple questions to analyze them and generate valuable ideas and ensure nothing is missing.
The second bit of secret sauce is: I have a deadline for end of week to demonstrate text ripping features of the accounting documents. But but but - the back of my mind is screaming - but that Google mapping API is really interesting and I bet I could get it done in less than ten minutes. How cool would be to map all their customer invoices on a map of the earth? And it would be really nice to research an open source document management system. And, and, it would be kind of neat to see if that system had a "bulk upload/download" feature - I mean, that sounds sensible enough?
All those questions/concerns/thoughts are unfocused, de-prioritized noise. I'm not getting anything accomplished and I'm in danger of getting even less accomplished if I follow any of those thoughts.
To combat this in FreeMind, I simply create another toplevel node called "Today's focus", drag the priorities into it from the other nodes, and then fold all the other nodes so that I don't become distracted.
... this, as evidenced by this sprawling post, still requires discipline to work. :)