Juggling Sheep
Welcome to Juggling Sheep, Jay Perry's blog about time management and personal productivity for pastors. Learn to balance work, life, family, and personal spirituality.

Share your best practices, tips and tricks, processes, sermon planning ideas, and resources. Feel free to email me: jaylperry[at]gmail[dot]com.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

PVW - Free Mind Mapping Software

A great way to do do exercise #4 (God at Work in My Past) in the Personal Vision Workbook is to create a Mind Map.

You can use a mind mapping program to brainstorm every major experience, transition, disappointment, loss, accomplishment, spiritual milestone, etc. that you've ever experienced.

You can then drag the different nodes around so that they're chronological. Save that as your "life history."

Then, you can color-code all the negative things you've ever gone through. Save that one as "negative experiences."

Then, you can drag the nodes around into groups and arrange them in different ways - spiritual experiences, life skills, bad habits, breakthroughs, sinful nature, relationships, etc. And then save that mind map as "life themes."

I understand there are a lot of mind mapping programs out there. I have just recently started using Free Mind, which is an open-source, free download. I found it pretty easy to start using (tab for a new child node, double return for a new sibling node). You can use mind mapping for all sorts of things - taking notes at meetings, brainstorming, planning a speech or presentation, sermon series planning, outlining Bible studies, designing website navigation, creating flowcharts, etc.

1 comment:

Jay said...

My new node directions were for the mac. For PC, you press insert for a new child node (still double return for a new sibling node).