Grow up, use Mindmaps by Anne Balke.
From the post:
No matter what the industry, there is one thing that all business owners have in common. We need to find ways to best utilize our time and to stay organized. Whether you’re just starting out or have had a successful business for years, in order to grow you need to plan for the future. The trick is finding a way to organize all the information that you gather along the way so that you can effectively develop a plan of action. You also need to be able to share your ideas and vision with others in a way that is concise and easy to follow.
The Solution – Mind Mapping
For small-business owners, mind maps are a useful tool for everything from brainstorming to strategic planning. Mind mapping is a way to visualize what you need to do and helps to organize information the same way that your brain does. NovaMind explains it quite well:
Our brains like thinking in pictures…The left half thinks linearly following direct linkages to related ideas. Our right brain likes to see the whole picture with colors and flow. A Mind Map caters to both sides of the brain… [making] it a very good way of storing and recalling information, presenting things to other people, and brainstorming new ideas.
I wasn’t aware the mind map folks had solved the problem of how brains work. Someone needs to call MIT to let them in on the news. 😉
Mind maps can be useful and may even be an authoring step prior to creation of a topic map. But a universal panacea, their not.
I won’t ever make a very good software zealot. What software is best for you depends on your requirements and resources.
It is dishonest, intellectually and morally to pretend otherwise.
If you are organizing a Christmas play for the approaching holidays, a topic map would do the job. But a spiral notebook and #2 pencil (with a pennalet for storage) has a shallower learning curve.
I would rephrase the title just a bit: Grow confident, use software that meets your needs, not what’s “hot” or popular.