How Do You Use Mind Maps in Your Daily Life?

Like Pokemon - they are everywhere!

How Do I Use Mind Maps in my Daily Life?

This is a really great question from one of the members of our Private Facebook coaching group. I think that one day I happened to mention that I use Mind Maps for pretty much everything that you would use for organising or planning within my home. They challenged me to look around during the course of a 24-hour period and list what these Mind Maps in Action actually are.

Bearing in mind I am a single mum of two young men who are both studying and I also run and consult on several businesses.

Life is busy!

In order to feel in control, I need to actually BE in control of all of the moving parts of my life, and my maps help me do that.

Family Life

So my children have been raised to see Mind Maps as a normal everyday skill. Mind Maps to them are as common as scrappy lists written on pieces of paper are for other people. Most of what they learnt about Mind Mapping was learnt by osmosis as they were simply the "that way we do it as a family." Mind Maps have simply always been around.

Shopping Lists

On the fridge, we have a shopping list Mind Map. If anyone finishes off a packet of something in the house they are responsible for listing that on the shopping mindmap.

The Mind Map is divided into 4 categories: fruit and veg, protein, dairy and snack foods.

I know there is no category for household cleaning and things like that but that is because I am the one that notices when the store cupboard is running low and I add that on my own list to make sure that they are covered.

Planning for Holidays

We also use my Mind Maps for planning on holidays or for family trips. It is no longer my responsibility to ensure that everything is organised and everything is planned and packed in advance.

If we are planning a swimming day we have a conversation about whose responsibility is to:

1 Fill up the car with petrol

2. Pack the swimming bags including swimming costumes towels and shampoo 

3 Make sure any snacks and water bottles are sourced and packed into the car 

4. Make sure the cat is fed before we leave 

5 Inform the neighbours that we will be out for the day (this is important because we are the person who usually accepts all packages for all the neighbours)

For longer trips and family holidays, the Mind Map is used more as a dream and goalsetting tool.

For instance, my youngest son and I are committed to attending a 2-week cruise in Florida with a group of online marketers in February 2023.

We've already begun the Mind Map that's helping us plan to make this a reality. For instance, I know that we need to organise to get new passports; will need to check what vaccinations are required; have work deadlines that we wish to achieve before we arrived there in 18 months; as well as a list of additional places we would like to visit; additional people we would like to see, and additional experiences we would like to have.

We are very excited to be able to travel to Florida in 2023. It has been a long time since we have travelled as a family. and as you can imagine this is a common topic of conversation at family dinners. But as we dream and we scheme, when we decide what needs to be done there is a place where we can list it all collated together so that when it comes time to take action we know exactly what we have agreed on and exactly what we desire to do.

It's amazing how motivated you can be in your day-to-day work when you know you have a great goal at the end of it. 

Mind Maps for Home Management

Organising chores

It is a busy home. A busy mum who runs several businesses and consults and several more, two sons one at High School and one at University who are busy studying and dealing with all of their extracurricular hobbies and interests.

That means we need to be very organised when it comes to dealing with the chores involved in running a house. I don't just mean the regular chores of who has to take out the bins on Wednesday, but the occasional larger tasks that need to be accomplished in order to keep a home running smoothly.

I mean things like the stop-taking of our store-cupboard, scheduling the maintenance of our boiler, cleaning the garden in preparation for winter, cleaning the gutters and drains. These are the big tasks that can often get overlooked in a busy household because they seem to fall to no one in particular.

In our house, we sit down at the beginning of the year and we make a list of everything that needs to be accomplished in the year / every month and then allocate that out to one person to be responsible for it from beginning to end. 

For instance, my teenager is responsible for stock-taking in our store cupboard and making a list of anything that needs to be replenished. My older son is responsible for cleaning the garden and the gutters and drains whereas I am responsible for scheduling and paying for the maintenance of the boiler. This Mind Map is posted in a storage cupboard on the ground floor of our house where all our cleaning materials are stored. My boys take great delight in scoring off their tasks as soon as they are accomplished!

Household Projects

Because we are busy we also need to plan for larger household projects in advance. Making sure that any building work is not scheduled over the exam season, or that plans for the garden are scheduled in advance so they don't interfere with the growing season.

We choose a few household projects that we wished to attempt this year and organise these on a Mind Map. This is also the place where we can record phone numbers of contractors, quotes, specs and record any issues that occur so that we can deal with them in advance.

PERSONAL MIND MAPS

Goal Tracking

The most common use of Mind Maps in our home is of course for my own personal use.

I use Mind Maps for tracking any goals that I am working on. Those may be financial goals (we are looking to pay off a mortgage this year) or they may be book related goals - for instance, I have a goal of 100 books I wish to read in 2022 and two books that I wish to write in 2022.

On all occasions, my go-to solution is a Mind Map.

I use it to track how much money I have saved, how many words I have written, how many chapters I have read. I use Mind Maps to track my progress towards my goals. 

This serves to keep my goals always at the forefront of my mind as I am constantly updating my progress and seeing how far I still have to go.

When you're working towards a goal, I find it very motivating to look in one place to see how far I have already come in achieving that goal and it makes the hard work much easier to bear when you can quantify how much further you still have to go. 

Self Management

I also have a series of Mind Maps that are held within my own Universal Personal Organiser.

These help me track my exercise habits (walk 1000 miles), planning my wardrobe (Project 333), and monitoring my diet. Not always very exciting goals but the Mind Maps help me keep on track for the longer term.

You might think with all of these Mind Maps that my house would be knee-deep in loose sheets of paper. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Big planning Mind Maps are usually pinned on the back of doors of relevant cupboards at the beginning of the year and remain there right through the year until they are replaced. One Mind Map in one place replaces multiple lists that have a tendency to get lost and go missing.

My personal Mind Maps find a home inside my personal file folder. It's big, it's bright pink and it's got a very girly slogan on the front. It simply can't go missing!! and it's a daily reminder for me to file my Mind Maps away so that I can find them again when needed.

But yes, there are always Mind Maps in progress, there is always a Mind map on the fridge and there is usually a Mind Map (or two or three) on the desks in my office.

But this is a very small price to pay for the feeling of being able to run my household smoothly and harmoniously from Monday to Sunday, 52 weeks of the year.

So my only suggestion to you is to use Mind Maps when and where you feel comfortable using them. The reality is that after you become confident and competent with the technique you will find them sneaking into your life in the most unexpected ways. One day you were scrabbling around for a missing list, the next pinning A beautiful Mind Map to your fridge.

It is so worth it - so have fun incorporating Mind Maps into your daily life too! 

Oh - and if you want to see the Mind Map that I made to write this blog post .. here it is XX