Mind maps are one of the most versatile visuals in the business world, largely because they’re easy to make and provide instant gratification for people who create and share them. Mind maps can be used for virtually anything, ranging from organizing your thoughts to scoping out tasks for a project, and they often serve as the starting point in the thought process for many visual thinkers.
One popular application for mind maps is to use them for setting goals and objectives, and here’s an example of a completed mind map to that effect:
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These are goals for an individual, but from the mind map you can appreciate the goal-setting process this person used. He (Jordan McKinney) began by organizing his goals into four groups:
- 12 month goals;
- 24 month goals;
- 5 year goals; and
- Lifetime goals.
The next step he took was to add specific objectives to each group of goals, such as “[m]eet and surpass supervisor’s 90 day expectations” under 12-month objectives or “[m]anage a department” under his 5-year objectives.
And that’s it – Jordan added increasingly specific goals to each topic until he was satisfied with what he had, and this whole process took him all of ten minutes to organize his goals and objectives into a coherent format.
If Jordan needed to reorganize his goals or add new high-level groups (such as 10-year goals), he could make those changes in SmartDraw in a matter of seconds. Jordan can insert new goals or objectives on his mind map with a single mouse click or a keyboard shortcut, and rearranging his goals on the mind map is just as easy.
This is just one real-world example of you can use mind maps to tackle real-world solutions quickly and more effectively than you could do otherwise.
