When you’re feeling unorganized, overwhelmed or have too many thoughts floating around in your head, using a mind map is a great tool to turn to. I typically use one at the beginning of each week to make sure I’m covering different areas of my life. This helps to ensure I stay balanced since it’s so easy to get out of balance, don’t you agree?
Here’s an example of one of my recent mind maps:
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1. Determine Your Focus on Your Mind Map
To get started with any mind map, decide what your focus for using the map will be. As I mentioned, I use it as a weekly brainstorm to ensure I’m staying balanced. However, you can use it to gather your thoughts and develop plans for a lot of different areas in your life.
Some of those areas include:
- Daily Plan
- Monthly Plan
- Business
- Study Guide
- Children (helping them gather and organize their thoughts)
- Health & Wellness
- Finances
- Decision Making
- Pros and Cons
- Relationships
- Spirituality
- Vacations
- Field Trips
- Parties
- Holidays
- Bucket Lists
- Packing Lists
- Gardening
- Brain Dumps
- Wish Lists
- Chores and Cleaning
- Goals, etc.
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2. Breakdown Your Focus on Your Mind Map
Once you’ve determined what your focus will be, write it in the middle. Then, determine different areas that are important to you with regard to that focus. This particular map provides 6 areas that you can break down your focus and do some additional planning.
As you can see, the areas I included are:
- Home
- Health
- Business
- Fun
- Soul
- Misc
These work great for me, but everyone will be different. Determine the areas that work best for you if you are using the mind map to plan out your week.
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3. Add Some Detail to Your Mind Map
Now that you have your focus broken down into main areas, it’s time to add some details. What do you want to accomplish in each area? I purposefully only included 3 spaces for each to help keep it manageable.
The details I included for my weekly focused mind map include:
- Home
- Organize food storage (we have a storage room where I put extra dry and canned goods. It’s gotten out of control lately :))
- Organize desk (post-it notes with ideas everywhere)
- Harvest stevia plant (I grew stevia for the first time this year. I’m excited to see how it turns out)
- Health
- Exercise at least 30 minutes a day
- Cook 3 plant-based meals
- Eat a salad and an apple every day
- Business
- Organize Tailwind (scheduler for Pinterest)
- Write 3 new blog posts (this is one of them)
- Organize those post-it notes
- Fun
- Bike ride with Jim (our favorite outdoor activity)
- Dinner with dad
- Paint at least one evening (mixed media painting is a hobby of mine)
- Soul
- EFT when needed (this is a reminder to me to utilize this tapping technique as a healthful tool)
- Meditate for at least 15 minutes a day (a regular practice of mine but sometimes I need reminders)
- Walk in nature (my alone time favorite activity)
- Misc
- Use coupon at the Healthy Place (a local health store)
- Apply for credit card (looking to add some miles to our collection)
- Call sister (I know…it’s sad that I need to add this to my to-do list)
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4. Create Your Official To-Do List
You could easily use the mind map as your to-do list; however, I like using a format that allows me to plan the days I’m going to get each task done and check it off as I go. It’s another way that helps me balance how much I’m trying to accomplish on any given day.
Here’s an example of my to-do list for the week:
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I hope this gives you some good ideas for the next time you are feeling overwhelmed or simply need to organize your thoughts. Please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear what you think. If you’re interested in more life planning tips, check out articles in these areas:
