Information hiding

There probably are some items in your mind maps that seem to get in your way. By being clear about the main purpose of each map you can limit their contents only to the most relevant things.

When I’m writing the content for this book I want to be fully immersed in it. There are many things related to writing the book, such as management of the whole book writing project or my another project on becoming a better writer in general. Still, I don’t want them in my book content map. I add links to them, so that I find them if I need them. In addition, when I do access them, the clicking of the link helps me to make a conscious context switch. My whole mindset changes when I move from the writer mode to the management mode.

Many mind map tools have a feature called folding. Folding allows you to quickly hide and show parts of a mind map, which will help you stay concentrated on a part of a map at a time. Folding has its limits though. My biggest maps have had thousands of items. I could fold most of those out of view but in practice these maps quickly became very hard to use. There is rarely a need to have everything in one map. See if you can move part of the items to a new map and link those two maps together.