Tuesday, July 5, 2016

"Organisez Vos Idees avec le Mindmapping" by Denis Rebaud et al.

Organisez Vos Idees avec le Mindmapping by Denis Rebaud et al.

goodreads.com rating: 3.5
my verdict: mixed, but it's worth a shot

pro: sincere intention to invite you to the mindmap
con: unorganized, incoherent, helter-skelter, verbose, out of focus



Everyone knows that action is the key to any change. David Allen's Getting Things Done is, in sum, about the importance of breaking things into pieces so that each piece becomes actionable.

Before this book, I've tried a few books on Mindmap, two books by Buzan himself and one by someone else. Even though the concept of mindmap is simple enough, I could not really grasp the usefulness of such a tool. Frankly, up until yesterday, my conclusion about mindmap was that it is another marketing BS. It felt like people are trying to sell something that they themselves do not know exactly what it is.

Yes, I talked about action. What happened was, yesterday afternoon, I just decided to give it a shot. I just decided to try making a few mindmap. The authors of this book says mindmap can be used in almost all mind activities, from taking a memo to managing projects. I tried summarizing a report, and voila, it felt not too bad.

I finished the book this lunchtime. And in the meantime, I summarized about five work-related reports using mindmap. It feels fun!

At the beginning of the book, it says one obstacle in using mindmap is people's gaze. Seeing you scribbling something on paper in a peculiar way, people might regard you a weirdo - is the fear you have that prevents you from trying mindmapping. Now I strongly agree. You'd better not take others' gaze into consideration when you want to decide whether mindmap is for you or not.

Mindmap, despite its dirty look, has one clear advantage: that you can see the whole in one shot. Now I believe that it's worth trying at least once. You might end up being another mindmapper, or maybe not. But why don't you even test it once?

p.s. About the book itself, you can never say it's well written. The book is composed of incoherent parts sewn together. However, the authors' intention is sincere, and somehow they succeeded in persuading me that mindmap is worth a try. So, I give it three stars even though the book itself deserves even less than that.

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