Mind Manager: Non-Linear Thinking

MindManager: Linear Thinking takes you straight to the expected.”

Email about using mapping software to create linear procedures for engineering processes.

—– Original Message —–
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 7:21 PM
Subject: mindthingy

This application is for hierarchies. The design process is linear-sequential. What you need is a simple checklist.

1. Draw preti pixchrs
2. add part nubmers
3. etc

Mind Manager: Linear Thinking takes you straight to the expected.

“Say hello to free-form thinking. Your brain doesn’t process in a linear fashion. Neither does Mindjet. Now you can think visually with dynamic layers of information displayed in a limitless arrangement that lends clarity to any project.”

Ontology software maps interrelationships between objects and concepts in a given domain in ways that aren’t intuitive to a linear-sequential mind. I’m not sure how Mind Manager will help write a procedure because procedures are by definition linear and sequential.

If you want to bring in resources like test equipment or people then a scheduling program like Microsoft Project Standard 2007 is more in order.

I was evaluating different mind mapping software at home. I set it up so that as I ran through my Saturday morning web work it would remind me of related tasks in case I wanted to work by tool or by priority instead of running through them in sequence. As the weeks went on I found I was adding children and siblings and dropping files and links onto it, but the license ran out and I was too cheap to buy it.

Mind mapping software is easier to use from the start of a project. If you input an existing data set and impose a well-thought-out rational structure on it, you’re totally missing the point. The creative process doesn’t have a rational structure. If it did, it would be called engineering. Oh *snap!*

There is a Mind Manager viewer so that users can only view the mind map. Mind Manager also can export to pdf, html, word, ppt, etc.

There are lots of available Mind Manager maps. No matter what you need to do with a mind map, you can probalby adapt an existing map to do what you want.

Don’t forget Microsoft Office templates. I think this one, “To do list for projects,” will work just fine for a test procedure.

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