No offense, but the mind map you recently sent to me really sucks.

It just doesn’t do a very good job of communicating to me what you’re trying to say. The mistakes you made are quite common – a lot of people make them. But I know that, deep down, you have a desire to make your mind maps as clear, effective and impactful as possible. So I hope you’re not too pissed off and will take my advice on how to improve it:

1. It doesn’t have a logical order or “flow” from one topic to the next, or from the parent to the child topics. It just seems to be a jumble of ideas. Perhaps you know in your mind what you meant when you created this visual map, but trust me – it doesn’t translate well to others. You really need to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience (e.g., me!). Who will be viewing this mind map? What level of knowledge can you assume they have about the subject of your map? Choose topic text and organize your topics and subtopics with great care. The burden is on YOU to communicate clearly. That’s always important in any kind of communication, but even more so with mind maps!

2. It’s visually boring. Black and white. No color. Just… dull. After I looked at your mind map, I almost slipped into a coma… The default setting of many mind mapping programs is to produce black and white mind maps. Very businesslike, but not very inspiring. If you’re trying to educate or persuade someone to do something, you need to create some visual interest. Add some color to the branches of your map, in ways that make visual sense and which will direct my eye to the most important elements of it. For example, a topic called “action items” could have a background color of green, because in most cultures, green means “go!” A topic that describes concerns with a project could be colored yellow, which means “caution.”

3. Mysterious images: Several of the images you incorporated into your mind map were hard to figure out. Mainly, I can’t understand what the connection is between them and the topic of your map. Whatever you’re trying to convey with these images, it’s lost on me. If you decide to add images to a mind map, consider carefully who the target audience for it will be. Does the image reinforce and enhance what you’re trying to convey in your topics and subtopics? If not, then don’t use it.

4. Your use of icons was arbitrary. I wasn’t sure why you included them in your mind map. Once again, they may have a certain meaning to you. But I don’t have the advantage of your context when I look at it. Used with care, icons and symbols add meaning and context to mind maps, and help people to visually classify their contents. But these look like they were picked at random and sprinkled randomly on your map’s branches. There’s an easy way to solve this problem: Add a legend to your mind map. That’s a floating topic with subtopics covering each of the icons you’ve used in the map, and a few words on what each one means. Problem solved!

5. Too much text in some of your topics: Some of the topics in your mind map contain a paragraph of text. Seriously? This is a mind map, not a document. Geez! Too much text makes mind maps look cluttered. It’s better to keep all topics to a maximum of 2-3 words, with the rest of your idea formatted as child topics or topic notes. That keeps things tidy, yet your audience is only one click away from being able to view additional detail.

6. Too many boundaries: Each first-level topic of your mind map and its child topics was enclosed in a boundary. What were you thinking? This is confusing to me, because I don’t know where to look first. Boundaries are supposed to be used on a limited basis, to call special attention to one or possibly two branches of your mind map. But you overdid it. When everything is emphasized, nothing stands out. Use. boundaries. sparingly.

7. TMI – too much information: Clearly, your mind map includes some information that I wasn’t meant to see. It may be useful background information for you for this project, but it means nothing to me. Whenever you share a mind map with other people – coworkers, customers, suppliers and others – consider carefully what they need to know and focus your map on delivering only that information and nothing more. Background or supporting information is for your reference. I don’t need to see it. Also, if you send people everything, you may be including some sensitive information that they weren’t really meant to see. You could get fired or seriously reprimanded for that!

The bottom line

When you produce a mind map that you intend to share with other people, don’t just finish it up and send it to them. Take a step back and do this mental exercise: Imagine, for a moment, that you are a representative of the people to whom you will be sending this mind map – let’s say, an important contact at a key customer. Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine how they think and feel. Now imagine they’re looking at your mind map. They’ve never seen it before, and don’t really know what it’s about. Will they be able to understand it? What seems to be unclear or potentially confusing? What do I need to explain better? What is the proper amount of detail to share?

If you don’t take this important step, the people to whom you send mind maps are likely to dismiss them out of hand – like I’m about to do with this mess you sent to me.

P.S. In case you haven’t already figured this out yet, I don’t REALLY hate your mind map. I’m just trying to draw attention to poor mind mapping practices, and the antidotes to them.

In most software programs, notes may be attached to any topic and are displayed in a separate pane to the right or below the workspace. They are especially useful because they can be easily hidden from view, yet can be accessed via a single mouse click. Many programs enable you to format your text, including, bullet points, numbered lists, tables and more. Once you have added a note to a topic, most programs give you a visual indication – usually by displaying a small note icon next to it.

How can you use topic notes?

This incredible flexibility makes topic notes an ideal repository for:

• Excerpts of articles that you are utilizing for a research project, along with a link back to the source article.
• The text of an e-mail that contains information relevant to a project.
• Capturing background information for a book, article or report you’re writing.
• Phone numbers, addresses and any other unstructured pieces of information that you may need at a future date.
• As a method to manually track changes to topic content, such as a version history. This is especially useful if you’re collaborating with others on a mind map.
• It’s possible to create mini-forms (such as a map revision history table) that can be  used within maps to track revisions or other relevant data.
• If you are distributing maps to others to complete, notes are a good place to include instructions.

Topic notes are an essential tool for helping to prevent information overload. Because they are normally hidden from view, they are a great place to store extended information that would otherwise be crowded into your mind map. As a form of visual diagramming, mind mapping was never designed to support more than a word or two per topic. Placing five words, or 20, or 50 any map topic results in a map that is almost unreadable. Notes enable you to create a very concise topic name, and then to capture all of the other important information in a note.

Notes on exporting topic notes to Word

When exported to Microsoft Word or other text format, most programs usually convert notes into paragraph text, while topics and subtopics are typically formatted as headings. Any formatting you have added to your notes text is may or may not be preserved when you export them – for best results, check to see what your program supports. If you’re a MindManager user, be sure to check out its capability to export only those topics that contain text notes – which is ideal if you’re mapping out a report, speech or book (in other words, this setting ignores all of the other topics that don’t have notes, so you don’t have to spend as much time cleaning up your content in Word).
If you tend to incorporate a lot of notes into your mind maps, check to see if the notes pane can be opened and closed using a keyboard shortcut (in MindManager, it’s CTRL + T) – that should significantly increase your productivity.

Capturing information in notes vs. linking to external documents

When should you use notes versus linking out to an external document, spreadsheet or other file? If the supporting information that you seek to add to your map is lengthy, longer than two pages, you may want to consider linking out to an external document. The notes windows of most mind mapping programs are highly functional, but you’ll probably find that they become ponderous when used with longer documents.

It also depends upon the nature of the information you are trying to capture. Say, for example, the information you’re trying to capture comes from an article on a news media site. If you don’t capture and save the entire text of that article, you may not be able to find it on their news site two weeks or two months later, because some websites don’t maintain permanent collections of all of their content.

Notes are most useful to you when they are of moderate length; excessively long notes become hard to digest. You may be better off to subdivide a particularly big thoughts into a number of subtopics (the functional equivalent of subheadings in a document) and add shorter notes to each one, rather than create a single enormous note.

(Thanks to Michael Deutch, MindManager evangelist at Mindjet, for contributing some of the topic notes application ideas)