MindMaps for Meeting Notes – Practical Results

Inspired by Tris’ post on using MindMaps for meeting notes, I thought I would try and implement the program and some of his suggestions during my weekend at Write on the Sound, a writers conference held here in Edmund, WA, this past weekend.

It’s a typical writers conference, or at least I think so. You sign up for one of four “tracks” offering up seminars about various aspects of writing, picking and choosing among the four during each hour and a half segment. Instead of taking notes in my trusty (rusty) three-ring binder, I decided to take notes using MindManager as Tris suggested.

I have used MindManager before for brainstorming sessions at work and for my personal project tracking, but never really used the program for the note taking aspect during meetings (or seminars).

The program worked really well. The things I liked best about using the program for meeting notes:

• Using the handouts, I quickly built a map around the subject areas of the handout. Then, while the speaker(s) spoke, I added notes around the topics identified in the handouts.
• New topics came up during the seminars and I was able to quickly add a topic and the important points associated with the topic with a simple few clicks
• Speakers wander around as well…and MindManager made it a simple task to move a point from one subject to another, or to take similar points from many different topics and move them (drag and drop) to a category of their own.
• Quickly reviewing the notes at the end of the hour and a half, I was able to clean up the notes and save the file into a completed page, a clean addition to the paper handouts offered at the seminars. MUCH easier than trying to rewrite all the stuff I usually have on paper.

Scot’s Pimp tip:

• While reviewing the notes at the end of the seminar, I used the ‘highlight’ function of MindManager to highlight the most important points that I got out of the seminar that was something that I would want to end up doing. It gives me a good way of also determining what I got out of each seminar.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of each of the four seminars I attended today. Based upon the green highlight color, can you tell which ones helped me the most?

12

3 4

Yup, numbers 2 and 3. What a cool tool!

Scot