Wednesday, September 17, 2008

I have officially become a geek.......

I'm in love...I admit it to the world.....the object of desire is not a man, or my kids (especially not this week), a handbag, shoes, or a watch.   It's a software program.  That's right kids, a SOFTWARE program.  You see, my thought process is usually something like this:

Margo's Thought Process

For an analytic person, I'm all over the place.  I start with a premise thought and as I work through the details, it's not unusual for me to work through multiple iterations as I find new pieces of information or rethink a process (or remember something else that I was supposed to do) until I get to my final destination - and even then I may go back and rethink it again.  My dear Boston buddy calls it navel gazing or rumination, but in reality, its rampant ADD. I can barely write a sentence without stopping to check out a website, read a headline, get a cup of coffee - honestly the inside of my head looks like a Family Circle cartoon where Jeffy goes looking for his lost sneaker.   Back at the new job, my task is to research and write analysis - lots of unstructured time which can be death for someone like me. 

To combat this, I have discovered Mind Mapper. It is a thought processing application that allows you to capture thoughts and arrange them in a flow chart/org charg/process chart that makes sense. It allows you to create relationships between thoughts so that you can support your hypothesis (Really sounding geeky now, aren't I??).  Essentially, it allows me to capture thoughts and ideas in any manner and turn the above spaghetti into this:

Testing Certification. Nice To Have Or Necessary.

Doesn't it look so orderly?  It simply reeks of an ordered thought process. What you don't see is that I've jumped all over the place, finding bits and pieces of information and shoving it in there until I can arrange it to make sense of it.  I've destroyed my last notebook. It will save my ass....at least until my Vyvance kicks in..

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh I would love this, I'm going to look into it! Thanks!

I am the flow chart queen!

Paul Zagaeski said...

Welcome to my world of geeky software. My archive of writing tools includes Acta, the first Mac outliner, and a mind-mapping tool called Inspiration. Some of my worst analyst reports and presentations were created with these!

This guy, although much too full of himself, is all over the net as the creator of mind maps.
http://www.imindmap.com/about_tony_buzan/

Debie Napoleon said...

I think you need to check out www.geeksugar.com site, it would be right up your alley these days.