Start with a mindmap

Over on Discord, @MDMooreUK asked the Small Business group a fairly complex question about their business setup.

Maybe it's because 'I'm a visual learner' (warning: not actual science), but I find this sort of thing much easier to approach if I crack open a mindmap. My love for MindNode is well known, but use whatever you have.

Turn words in to nodes

My first step is to just read through the question and pull out the key parts. While you're here you might as well loosely organise in to concepts.

It's important to realise that you're not creating some work of art here. Often enough I don't even save these files: I just use them as a scratchpad for my mind. So on the left, I've extracted what I thought were the key parts of the original question.

Create links

The point of this is to link these concepts in my mind, and to convey them to others. I was trying to type out a response on Discord and wished I was on camera, waving my arms around. 'This links to that', I'd be saying.

That's when I realised the mindmap was the answer. So on the right I've extracted key parts of the SBS, and I've linked the two maps together (Cmd+Shift+L in MindNode) and added some comments to the links.

Brings an idea to life; breaks it up

For me, this immediately brings the idea to life. And now we have a simple diagram that we can talk to, and specific parts that we can focus on. Rather than one mega-question, now we have a bunch of sub-questions. Much more manageable.

If in doubt, crack open MindNode.