Top 6 Ways to Improve Work Efficiency with Mind Maps

Mind mapping is an easy and convenient solution for you whether you are improving business skills, handling with overload info or boosting your work productivity. The main reason for the powerful productivity of a mind map is it follows a similar and natural way to your brain. Check more details below for the top ways to improve work efficiency with mind maps.

Creating Your Short or Long-term Working Plan

It really helps you a lot to improve work efficiency with mind maps. Therefore, you can have a good overview of the noise in your hand. Creating a long-term plan with mind maps would also easy even in just a few minutes. You are free to update the plan at any time so tasks are removed which are done. In this case, a radial manner mind map with a clear central starting point could be effective. Alternatively, you can try some horizontal ones to improve work efficiency with mind maps.

Graph made by the Mac Mind Mapping Application Edraw MindMaster

Making Quick Notes for Meetings

In the past, you may be busying taking notes for mass points and ideas one by one. Afterward, you may just be trying to remember the meaning of each point, and sometimes, it may be even worse due to bad handwriting. However, if you give a shoot to improve work efficiency with mind maps, things would get much clear. A mind map with branches of tips or tricks would be a great agenda for your business meeting.

Generating Mind Maps for Seminars

The use of a single mind map could be huge and quite potential. You can try one to talk for hours during your meetings. For example, for those interns training courses from large-scale enterprises, a series of clear introduction mind maps would show new employees the organizational culture and aims of the enterprise. In such cases, useful info spreads about six times quicker than those only text-based boring documents or presentation slides. Listeners are always looking for something interesting and entertaining, so, serve your audience a colorful one to improve work efficiency with mind maps.

Doing Project Management

A Mind Map makes the visualization of project progress much clear than traditional paper documents.  Therefore, you can:

• quickly see the relationships between sub-tasks;
• set goals and managing your milestones, budgets, resources, team members and deadline;
• break down information into comprehensible branches;
• check out the wide perspective throughout your overall project;
• further monitor any issues and solve stumbling blocks to improve work efficiency with mind maps.

Performance coaching

Performance coaching could be time consuming and ineffective. However, using a mind map appropriately can turn a rigid performance assignment into an effective performance coaching. The HR manager and employees should on the same page before the final stage. You can see an example below for coaching details by using mind maps. The red branches are the improvement where employees can achieve, whereas the green area is for marking individual performance with sub-criteria.

Mind Maps for Problem-solving

It seems that the most popular approach to the problem-solving process is the 5W plus 1H theory. The 5W refer to Who, What, Where, When and Why, and the 1H means How. This is a great case to improve work efficiency with mind maps because as you expand each topic, you will see relations between each topic even for you to print out. Problems will be clarified as you check all the questions. Each question should be answered in isolation when you start off to come to a solution. More alternative examples could be the Six Thinking Hats theory, the Porter’s Five Forces Analysis, the Manufacturing Process, SWOT analysis and so on.

More Useful Tips

The British author Tony Buzan who trademarked the concept “mind map” offered a series of tips for your to improve work efficiency with mind maps:

• Try to add images to your central idea. An image is worth a thousand words and gives your brain more of a buzz.
• Try to create curved branches instead of straight lines.
• Try to use only one keyword for each of your lines for more power and flexibility.

Conclusion

Unlike a table or form, a Mind Map encourages users to explore points confidently so as to overcome any potential topics. Due to the visual characteristic of mind maps, you can easily spot relationships between branches especially when you are mapping out different scenarios. No matter what, the key point is we are not in the business of making stunning mind maps, but just want clarity on our information and ideas.