Refactoring

Your first map starts to grow. The more you think and write down things, the bigger the map gets. You rarely delete things from your map. If some items seem irrelevant at the moment, you create a new branch in your map to store those.

If a single branch of the map grows much faster than the others you start to think how to best return balance to your map. You need to refactor, or restructure, your mind maps. One way is to create a new branch on top level, or to come up with another way of categorizing the items. You can then move items from the overgrown branch back closer to the center. If you first try to categorize your items to branches called ‘big’ and ‘small’, you can add a category ‘medium’, if the two categories become too big. If you notice that most of the items are in one category, you can switch to another set of categories. Maybe dividing by color instead of size would make more sense, and you could switch to categories ‘black’ and ‘white’ instead.

Another option is to cut the branch off and continue developing it in a new map that you link to the original. This type of spin-offs are common in the beginning of any new venture. You decide to start a physical training program to get yourself back in shape. The next day you find yourself studying about healthy nutrition and human anatomy. However important and relevant these are for your goal, they are still most likely sidetracks. If you start studying those things and include them in your training map, you might think you are getting somewhere, because the map is evolving. Even though you just skipped your physical exercises today, again. To keep your original focus, create new maps for your new study fields and link them to your training map as resources.