Tubetorial Quick Tips - Mindmapping a To-Do List

Mindmapping can be used for numerous purposes including brainstorming, organizing keyword lists, managing projects, and various other planning and productivity tasks. They’re also useful for complex to-do lists, especially if your tasks have some hierarchy.

Now, as I mention in the video at the bottom of this post, a simple paper-based mindmap is usually more than enough for the average to-do list. Sometimes it’s overkill. But for the type of to-do lists I have, such as for my full-time blogging tasks, I find it useful to plot out a week or more. Where digital mindmaps are really useful, however, is that you can cut and paste URLs, snippets of text, images, and even add notes or hyperlink map nodes to other applications.

The video is only intended for those who have never used mindmaps before, or have recently started but haven’t used them for to-do lists. In a later tubetorial, I’ll show an example of hyperlinking map nodes.

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9 Comments ↓

  • shaz said:

    great info liked the tute

  • Brainstorming Is Useless If You Can’t See The Big Picture | Smart Wealthy Rich said:

    [...] I’ve been using the FreeMind application (macintosh) quite a lot lately, since Raj from Tubetorial wrote about MindMaps and also how to manage a to-do list using MindMap, and I have to say it’s an incredibly useful piece of software. It’s more fun than notepad or textedit that’s for sure. For windows users, there are many softwares available such as MindMap, Mindapp and NovaMind. [...]

  • Bootstrapper » Secrets of Thinking Outside the Box: 27 Ways Digital Entrepreneurs Can Use Mindmapping said:

    [...] Task Management. A look around the blogosphere shows that a lot of people are becoming interested in David Allen’s GTD (Get Things Done) principles. Mindmaps can help you to organize your to-do lists, manage and prioritize tasks. You can also manage/track teammates’ tasks [...]

  • Tom said:

    Don’t mean to be critical, but you said this tubetorial was for people who had never mindmapped before. Well, if I am you audience, it sucked! I have no idea what you were doing or how or where to find the software you were using. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but I thought you would actually explain what you were doing. Did I miss something? Did I have a blackout? A brainfart?

  • raj said:

    Hi Tom, you know you’re right. In retrospect I realize now that I didn’t say enough in the video about what I was actually doing while adding map nodes. My apologies and thanks very much for concretely pointing out the problems.

    I’m not currently working on Tubetorial, so I can’t rectify this. However, I will soon be launching a new project with a colleague which will clarify things in both print and video. The announcement will come on my personal blog (linked to from my name.)

  • raj said:

    clarification: despite the comment saying I’m the editor, i am not so at present.

  • raj said:

    One point though, Tom, I have indicated where to get some mindmapping software in the tubetorial that I linked to in the article. And that article further links to another tubetorial post, which lists seven mindmapping apps.

    Also, check out the following article, which I stumbled across:
    http://www.collegedegree.com/library/college-life/99-mind-mapping

    It lists 99 mindmapping resources. Hope this helps somewhat.

  • Brainstorming Is Useless If You Can not See The Big Picture « .:: Peta Konsep Anak Bangsa ::. said:

    [...] (macintosh) quite a lot lately, since Raj from Tubetorial wrote about MindMaps and also how to manage a to-do list using MindMap, and I have to say it’s an incredibly useful piece of software. It’s more fun than notepad or [...]

  • Freddie said:

    Mind mapping is very interesting. I have done this on paper sporadically and can see the benefit of utilizing this on a daily basis. The electronic software would be an awesome upgrade that I believe I will be talking advantage of. Going to check the links out and see what I can find.

    Thanks for the post, but I do agree with Tom above that I expected more direction. Got one of the links planning now, so maybe that was your point.

    Nevertheless, that’s for the insight!