Dinosaurs

Mind maps can get too large. Just because it is possible to have a million items in a single map, and even have it organized, doesn’t mean you should do that. It can be tempting, because it feels good to see how many things you have in your mind. You can also create some visually attractive images of them and impress your friends. The problem is that the larger the map gets, the slower it becomes to work with it. Looking up things and adding new ones to a huge map can become so difficult that you simply don’t want to do it anymore. Making changes to the structure gets harder, too, because your map has become, well, a dinosaur.

Let’s do the math again. You have five levels of items, five items on each level. It kind of sounds reasonable, don’t you think? How many items you have in total? 3125. I’m not sure one needs to be aware of that many things at any one time. You’ll find notes and ideas that have been buried there for years without anyone remembering. The concept of refactoring comes to mind. Split the map into smaller ones, and link them together if needed.

One time I was going through my old maps and came across a massive ones that I didn’t even remember existed. Thousands of items in a single map. I started marveling that such great creatures existed. Then I started to ponder the reason behind the disappearance. Was there a catastrophe? Another explanation is that they couldn’t adapt to the changing environment and were gradually replaced by more viable species of maps.

Based on the evidence I’ve found by looking at my historical maps, dinosaurs were quite prevalent and ruled my mind maps for many years in the early days. At some point they appear to have all disappeared in a quite a short time. They were replaced by smaller, more flexible and adaptive maps that started to follow the principle of information hiding.

The biggest dinosaur that I’ve found is a map called “The center”. I found it when writing this book and I dated it back to somewhere around 2004. It contained over 30 000 items, probably being an attempt to “figure it all out”. Or maybe it was just an experiment to see how well it works if I bring all my maps together to one massive index. Well, it wasn’t very useful, but it made for a pretty picture. You can see a visualization of the map in the cover of this book.