After recently listening to On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee and taking the Imagination course with Dr. Stamp here at UND, I’ve become fascinated with the human brain and how we actually think and work. Because of this, I get really excited when I come across some different way of working that takes advantage of how our minds work. What’s that? Yes, I do know that I’m a geek.
Anyway, here are a couple examples of what I mean:
- Getting Things Done
: David Allen’s systematic approach for managing all of the “stuff” in your life. This awesome approach frees your mind from the clutter of trying to remember everything you need to get done in the various parts of your life. It’s really liberating to get things down on paper and instead use your brain for what it’s really good for: thinking
- Mind Mapping: Although I’ve known about the idea behind mind mapping for at least several years, I can honestly say that I didn’t “get it” until recently. A couple posts on the Creating Passionate Customers blog really helped me understand how our brains naturally make connections and associations between things, something a mind map does much better than a regular bulleted outline ever could. I finally had my “light bulb” moment when I used mind mapping to create and capture new ideas for my Imagination class. I’m now a believer!
My latest discovery came late last night while I was working on my final concept for my class with Dr. Stamp, which I will be pitching later this afternoon. I was using the thesaurus at Thesaurus.com when I came across a text ad for a product called the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus. Play around with the free version for a few minutes and then tell me that you wouldn’t choose it over a dead tree version. There is tremendous power in being able to see the connections between words. Simply awesome!