Mapping the year

Still on the theme of starting the year, but without anyknown tsarist involvement, here’s my wall décor in my dining room:

It’s my hardcopy mind map for what I want 2017 to include for me. There are major categories, subset nodes and sub-subsets.

I like using colored stickies for this function. For mind-mapping, stickies are about equal with a big-ass whiteboard. (The last time I did mind-mapping, for a class assignment in the Valley They Call Silicon, it was an extremely frustrating effort, due to lack of whiteboard, big-ass or otherwise, and no inspiration to use the stickies. The results were less than stellar.)

In fact, this time around, I actually started with a big-ass whiteboard, in my office, and transferred all the nodes to the stickies so I could erase all evidence at work of attempting a personal life and transport the information home.

Since then I’ve transposed much of it online using a mind-mapping software package that’s a bit of a kludge, but easier to manage because I already have the visual notion of what I want included and in what hierarchical structure. Back at Stanford, I was trying to do it all online from the get-go, and there was a lot of resulting blood in the vicinity.

Anyhow, I now have some shape for dealing with 2017. Let’s hope I end it better than my Romanov relatives.