FreeMind: Free Your Mind

I couldn’t sleep last night. I had an idea that was literally driving me to the brink of insanity with its incessant evolution in my mind. Let’s just say it was a doozy. That being said, what I ended up doing about it worked really, really well, and the tool I chose ended up really impressing me.

A Beautiful Mind(map)

Mind mapping lets you brainstorm your ideas and get them out of your head. According to Wikipedia:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making.

From: Mind map - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an essential part of Getting Things Done and, as I found out last night, works fantastically. Your brain only has so much space for ideas, but once you start clearing it out, it will keep giving you more. An avalanche, if the material is there.

Enter FreeMind

FreeMind is free Mind Mapping software, available for OS X, Windows and Linux. It’s written in Java, and while I often find Java apps to be clunky and quite obviously Java apps, I all but forgot that this same program was written for Windows. Not that it’s beautiful, but the interface was so easy and if you disable the toolbars and deal solely with contextual menus, there’s really not a lot of GUI cruft to get in the way of your thinking. I quite literally was able to enter ideas as fast as my brain was coming up with them.

The beauty of FreeMind is that it can be navigated with just the keyboard, allowing you to very rapidly add child and sibling nodes as the ideas come. Jumping around from node to node is intuitive using the arrow keys. When you do grab your mouse, you can zoom and pan around the mindmap very easily. It allows for a good number of formatting options and handles auto-formatting based on levels once you’ve got some information entered. It can export to XHTML, PDF, JPEG and more. It has a lot of extra icons and formatting options that I’ll probably never use, but for my purposes, this ended up being an ideal tool. In two hours I had formulated a map that became a very convincing presentation and is on its way to becoming a business plan.

I honestly can’t believe how quickly the idea took shape and how fast the holes filled in once I had things out of my head and into FreeMind. And it worked faster than I could have done on a whiteboard or paper, and automatically arranged and formatted for me in a way that I never could have managed on paper. And I could even drag an entire node and all of its children into a new parent node if I needed to for organizational purposes as the idea grew. And for my group presentation I just organized my map into cohesive groups, fleshed out some thoughts and projected my Mind Map right up onto the screen and worked through it as if it were the back of my hand. It’s already an outline and will take me just a couple of hours to turn into a full fledged, well organized document suitable for presentation to investors.

If you need to organize an idea or brainstorm for any occasion, FreeMind gets an official Circle Six recommendation.