Similarity

When I first got excited about mind mapping, I really made maps about everything that came to mind. Each map ended up a little bit different, and I had trouble figuring out a good structure that would fit them all.

It was quite confusing to jump from one map to another and always having to start with the question of what in the world I’ve been thinking here. The more maps I created the harder it became to manage all that diversity. I tried many different ways to organize it all, and I gradually gravitated towards simpler and simpler structures.

I tried to find a structure that I could repeat all over again in any context, that would allow me to scale my map repository to ever bigger number of maps. No matter how much content I would add in my maps, I wanted the structure to retain its most basic shape, and enable me to have some kind of hold of it all. One such structure that served as an ideal for me was the fractal, a simple pattern that you can repeat forever and scales infinitely. In nature these kinds of patterns are all over the place. In computer science a related concept is recursion. If you are not familiar with those terms, it doesn’t really matter.

The main point is this: almost all of my current maps look more or less similar to each other. For example, most of them have a management or meta branch that contains information about the map in question and its purpose, maybe with a to-do list and a journal. They also have a context branch that tells me what else outside of the map is relevant to the topic, along with links to related maps. The maps share a common basic structure, even if their content and purpose would be totally different. It makes dealing with a growing number of maps much, much simpler.