Mind Mapping Ideas: 8 Ways To Use This Creative Technique To Try

Do you want some mind mapping ideas to help with your creative or brainstorming process? Here, we feature eight views for your next mind mapping session.

Mind mapping is an ideal approach for creatives. It’s a proven concept for exploring a central idea, organizing supporting points and connecting topics and themes. You can mind map almost anywhere with free or relatively inexpensive tools, alone or with other people. Assuming you know how to mind map, use these ideas below to start today.

1. Write an Essay for School

One of the first ways you can use a mind mapping tool is to write an essay for school. If someone has given you a writing assignment for a class, you can use mind mapping to help you figure out how to organize your supporting points. You may want to put the thesis of the essay in the center. Then, you can use individual spokes that come out from the center to signify supporting paragraphs.

You might even want to label the supporting paragraph boxes with your topic sentence. Then, you can draw individual lines for each supporting paragraph, signifying the supporting points you want to include in each paragraph. 

Learn how to write an argumentative essay

2. Organize an Academic Research Paper

You can also use mind mapping software to organize an academic research paper. If you are trying to publish something in an academic journal, you need to display the evidence in a way someone will understand. You may have done the research, completed experiments, and compiled a bunch of citations for the paper. How are you going to organize it?

One of the ways to do that is to put all the evidence on the page in front of you. Then, use mind mapping software to figure out how they relate together. That way, you can organize your ideas in a clear, logical, streamlined manner. 

3. Plan Your Goals

Mind mapping is ideal for setting creative business goals. For example, let’s say you want to figure out what success looks like for your next project.

For a central concept, write down the overall goal. Then, radiating out from the center, include key performance indicators. Finally, break these branches down further into factors that underpin key performance indicators.

To elaborate further:

• The main goal could be to start a popular YouTube Channel within your niche
• Key performance indicators could be views and subscribers
• The underpinning measures could be videos edited and recorded per week

4. Improve Employee Retention

Another way a mind mapping tool might help you in the business world is to improve employee retention. Many companies are looking for ways to get their talented employees to stick around. You may want to use my mapping software to figure out how to do that.

You may survey your employees regularly, figuring out what they like and what they don’t like. Then, you can use mind mapping software to put all of these factors on the page. On one side of the page, you may include things your employees like. Then, on the other side of the page, you may include things your employees don’t like.

Radiating from each of these ideas, you can include ways to improve the things your employees like and reduce the things your employees don’t like. You may even want to share this with your employees. That way, they know their feedback is being taken seriously. Finally, radiating out from the individual points, you can include ideas regarding how to improve the work environment to keep your employees happy.

5. Plan a New Blog Post or Article

You can also use mind mapping tools to help you plan the content you will post online. It can be difficult to reconcile search engine optimization with the readability of your content. You might have a bunch of keywords you need to integrate into your content. How are you going to work them into your main idea? A mind mapping tool can help you do that.

Use the mind mapping tool to plot the individual points you want to include in your blog post or article. Then, take the keywords you need to include and connect them to the individual points in the article. That way, you know what keywords you need to incorporate in which location in the article. This can make it easier for you to help your search engine optimization campaign match the readability of your content.

Learn how to write an article

6. Divide Up Project Management Tasks

Are you trying to improve your project management? If so, a mind mapping tool can help you do that. If you’ve lots of tasks to accomplish and are unsure about who should do what, mind map your projects. Use a mind mapping tool, create a central box for the overall name of a key project. Then, create separate boxes off of the central project for the individual tasks to be completed.

Then, use boxes connected to the individual tasks signifying who is supposed to do what. Specify deliverables in the box, so people understand what to work on and when. This is a great way to keep everyone on the same page. 

7. Mind Map Your Book

Mind mapping is a great creative technique for planning a book. Write down the main idea for your book in the center of your mind map. Then, connect related ideas and reogranize them as chapters, until you have a book structure that works. You can take this one step further by creating mind maps for individual book chapters too. It’s more liberating and faster than trying to write book chapters one by one.

Our guide about how to write a story outline explains more.     

8. Outline Chapters  In Your Book

Finally, you can also use a mind mapping tool to plan. Let’s take the example of writing a cookbook chapter. Using this technique, group similar recipes for your chapter. Then, using boxes coming off of each recipe, you can include tips, tricks, steps, and ingredients. This process will make it easier to organize content before writing everything out in your cookbook.

Consider putting a few of these ideas to work for you during your next mind mapping session.

Final Word on Mind Mapping Ideas

The best mind mapping software can help you try these mind map ideas in real-time. You can work on a mind map at your computer or iPad until you’ve got a creative plan or structure that works. That said, mind mapping also lends itself nicely to analogue tools like giant sheets of paper, markers of different colors and or a whiteboard. So pick an idea and put this practice to good use. 

FAQs About Mind Mapping Ideas