Stuart Marsh

Quite often when I write blog posts, I’ll just sit down and start writing. No planning, just a little forethought.  Then I have to edit as I go along, move sections, delete things that don’t flow right.

I wanted to try a different approach to make planning a post easier, and to be able to arrange the flow of the writing before I actually started writing it. With this in mind, I decided to create a mind map of the post.

Mind Mapping

For those of you that haven’t come across mind mapping before, it’s often used to brainstorm ideas. Rather than have me explain it, take a look at the Wikipedia page on mind mapping for a more thorough description.

My Process

I took the essence of the mind map, and used it to organise my thoughts around my post.  Here’s what I did.

• Started off with the post title as the main central node
• Created child nodes for each of my sub headings
• Created further child nodes under these to outline the ideas I would write about in that section
• Rinse and repeat

I tried this on my last post about Managing Twitter and I found it made the writing process much easier, as I could follow the mind map for each heading.

Don’t go into too much detail on the mind map.  Just short sentences to outline the information is all that’s needed.

Here’s what I ended up with (click to view a larger version):

Software

I used Mind Node for the Mac (free), but if you use window you could try Free Mind, which is open source and free.

Go ahead and try it, let me know how you get on.  Or do you have any other methods that do the same thing?