If you haven’t heard of Getting Things Done then where have you been?  Getting Things Done or GTD for short, is an action management system by David Allen. Part of this system involves a weekly review where you can create lists of actionable items that lead to a completed goal.  Each of these actionable items have a context.  The context of the actionable item is the context in which it can be done, e.g. “At home” or “@home” for a shorter notation.

This recipe will allow you to quickly create a mind map of your actionable items by context. Here's the structure of the mind map:

• The centre of the map will be the date this list is effective from. My mind maps usually consist of a weeks items at a time.  In the centre of the map I’ll usually simply use the date as a starting point.
• The 1st level of branches are the different contexts your next actions have. Create branches for each of the contexts you think you’ll need.  If you have your items already listed somewhere, go through the list and create the context branches you’ll need.
• The final level of branches are the actionable items themselves. For the final level of branches you can now add your actionable items.  I tend to keep my actionable items short in description, but if you can shorten it further to an image that works for you then use that image.

There you have it!  A review of your actionable items by context.  Unless you take pride in the appearance of your mind maps, I wouldn't get too caught up over the presentation of the map.  Your mind map is only valid for a week, so it's only got a short lifespan.

This is going to be the first in a series of posts that will outline the basic structure of a mind map for a particular subject or topic.  Each recipe will list the levels of branches in the mind map and what to put in them.

I spend a lot time reading development books, and more often than not I always end up having to go back to the book to check something.  A few years ago I started mind mapping each development book I read to help gather and process the information from the book. Here's the structure of the mind map:

• The centre of the mind map will be the title of the book we are reading. I always use an image of some kind to represent the title of the book, but you could also use a keyword to describe the book or a mixture of keywords and an image.
• The 1st level of branches will contain the chapters within the book. I usually flip through the book and pick out the chapters that I want to mind map.  I space out the chapter branches evenly to give myself enough room for each one.
• The 2nd level of branches below each chapter contain the sections for that chapter. Now more often than not there won't be any visible sections in the book, so I flip through each chapter on the mind map and find these sections so that I can group my notes from each chapter.
• The final level of branches is the notes on the book itself. As we have a structure of chapters and sections, I can now pick a section on the mind map and read that actual section, adding notes as branches as I go along.

Finally, if you're going to be creating a mind map to use as a long term reference map, then I suggest you do a first pass of the mind map in pencil without putting too much emphasis on presentation.  Then once you have all the notes you require, you can then start a final pass of the mind map.  In this final pass you can substitute keywords for images and make use of colour in your branches.