How MindManager Helps Me Study

First off let me start of my warning you that you may find this article to be a bit on the boring side.  It shares some personal information about me, my learning style and my genuine feeling that MindManager will be an incredible benefit to my learning, organizing and overall experience as a student.  I feel this information may assist you as I post more about MindManager throughout the semester but hopefully now you will understand why I post with such enthusiasm.

My relationship with MindManager this week thus far has been an interesting and exciting one.  I should mention that I have been on spring break so I have not been able to really “test” my hypothesis that MindManger will enhance my learning entirely.  However I have taken it upon myself to introduce MindManger to many of my classes and the subject matter covered to see its interaction with such material.  I wanted to discover if MindManager would form a water and oil relationship with my OneNote notes or if it would add anything to my planner in GoBinder.  Would it be just another separate program to work with or could it be integrated into my current programs and studying habits.  Common sense would say with my busy schedule that learning and working with yet another program would be ludicrous   However, I had some time over break to really give it a chance without worrying about it distracting me from my school work.

The more I work with MindManger though the more I see it taking over a lot of the things that I use the above mentioned programs for.  It may be only a matter of time before OneNote and GoBinder are enhancements to my MindManager Maps. Only time will be able to answer this question in its entirety. As I spend more time with MindManager the more I see that it coordinates with my particular learning style.  I hope to share several experiences in how it performs this task but I think knowing more about me on a personal level will allow you to understand how beneficial MindManager is.

I am biology student that has the dream of attending graduate school and becoming involved in the medical community.  This means I take classes that revolve around the worlds of biology and chemistry.  These two subjects can provide a lot of difficulty if one does not know how to organize the material.  I also have ADD and have been diagnosed with it since my days of high school.  Although a lot of people see ADD as a pseudo disorder that many people use as an excuse, it is something that I have had to face for numerous years.  With often large and complex material and a tendency to drift from main ideas I constantly find myself studying all the time.  I often have difficulty seeing the “big picture” and really organizing everything into a manageable form and thus spend time trying to abstract it all from my notes and text.  To combat all this I have been able to come up with a few things that work.  Standing in my room the other day I observed one way that I do this.  

My room is decorated with 3 whiteboards and numerous boxes of different color dry erase markers.  I have printouts taped on my walls and around my desk that accent the neatly arranged diagrams from my text books.  My taste in such decorating allows me to capture the big picture while I am reading about the details in my textbook.  Basically I like to see as much as I can at one time.  It is this wall space that allows me to make important connections and grasp core concepts.  I understand that everybody has different study methods but for anyone out there that faces similar difficulties I suggest you take a serious look at picking up a copy of MindManager.

As you can see in the pictures a lot of my drawings are main ideas and thoughts organized in such a way that allows me to see visually how they interconnect.  This visual connection that is formed really allows me to see everything in how it relates.  I sometimes draw these in OneNote but I always quickly run out of space.  MindManger solves this problem by allowing me to expand and collapse different aspects of the map at will. This power lets me view only the main ideas or I can expand everything to see it all at once.  If I want to expand just one main idea then I can stay with that topic and expand that one area of interest.  If I want to see how that specific section relates to another main idea then I can usually just reveal those two sets of details in very close proximity to one another.  If you’re anything like me you’re probably reading all of this and only seeing words.  To see what I am talking about you really need to see a video.  The tutorials from MindManger are pretty good at showing you this but I honestly hope I can somehow make one of my own for those struggling with the concepts.


If you’re having a hard time understanding just how helpful the program can be then you really need to download the trial and start playing around with it.  Playing around with it the past few days have been truly remarkable.  This may sound over the top and you may be thinking, Ok how much are they paying this guy to say all of this, but I kid you not; I honestly see MindManager as something that is really going to help my learning.  

I’ll still have those white boards for awhile but I honestly think MindManager will be promoted and actually end up doing a better job than my beloved white boards.  For one I won’t have to have as many whiteboards and setting up photo shoots where I capture the information on them will be something I no longer will have to be embarrassed about.  I can now just create a new map and save it.  In sense I can have as many whiteboards as I want with me wherever I go!  It is sure a lot easier to carry around my tablet with MindManger on it than several 4’x5’ dry erase boards and a toolbox of different color markers.  

If I had a large widescreen LCD hooked up to my Tablet and running MindManager the amount of information that I could display would be extraordinary!  Maybe I should take out a few several student loans to make this happen. I can say I need a gigantic LCD to enhance my learning.  Of course this is a fantasy but if you’re lucky enough to have a campus that allows students access to such displays or projectors this could be entirely possible.  I can just imagine a group of students sitting together with a giant MindManager map on a screen and walking their eyes through it while verbally discussing it together.  You would then incorporate the visual aspect, the verbal and the peer group cooperation to create a very promising study eniviroement.

I can also recall on several occasions when studying with friends where we would have to rummage through our notes to find something we are looking for.  I can usually do a quick search on my tablet but then I am often far away from the material that had lead to the initial search fest.  With MindManager all the information that needs to be discussed would be right there in front of you.  It would only be a matter of expanding a different section of the map to see all the details.

Seeing, really is believing. This phrase suits MindManager in that you really do need to see it in action to really understand the power behind it all but also goes back to my learning style.  One reason I make all those different drawings is to put all that information together into something I can actually see and visualize.  I think I saw a statistic on the MindManager site that said something like 60% of us are visual learners.  Many of my textbooks are really good at helping us with this by providing many diagrams and drawings that accompany the complex words and paragraphs and transform it into a medium we can visualize.  MindManager takes it once step further by allowing the combination of all those diagrams, pictures, and paragraphs into one easy to manage MindManager Map.

Now I am sorry if I bored you with all of this but I could probably continue to go about this but hopefully a few posts here and there will speak louder that my words.  My goal is writing this is as always to help other students.  if I can help just one student that faces the same problems then this article was entirely worth my time and effort.  Going into the medical field it is obvious that helping others is really the core value that fuels my desire. I hope to give examples of all this throughout the rest of the semester but for now felt it necessary to express just how helpful this program will be for me as a student.

posted by Jason Dorko at 3:52 PM 0 comments links to this post