In this strange brain of mine, it’s hard to get things lined up in a very chronological order. Which is why I end up with a lot of half finished projects. I’m not going to call the “problem” I have “ADD”, I’m going to coin a new term here and now called…. uhmmmm, what was I saying? 
j/k, I’m calling it:
MAD! Multitasked Attention Disorder. (I’ve got five desktops for different tasks, two Firefox windows, and thriteen tabs open). Running wiki searches while typing here.
Luckily though, through my latest round of devotions to the Penguin, I’ve found some more tools to help me wrap my latest project around my brain instead of the other way around. Like that’s what I need, more tools to learn, keeping me from doing the things I need to be doing. However, if I learn these tools, then I’ll be faster at learning more things in the future when I’m trying to learn a new tool to make my workflow move quicker, but that’s in the future.
Anyway, VYM (View Your Mind) at first sounded like a psychological test, and in parts, it is. It’s a program which allows you to take notes on the computer using Mind Maps. I’m familiar with the term because as a professor I have to attend seminars which teach us how to teach. They inform us to use mind maps as a tool for the students, but I’ve never been shown what a mind map was or how to use one. I wouldn’t have known how to start a mind map if it hit me like a flyswatter popping out of the ground. Hell, I stumbled across this program out of almost sheer narcissism. I thought for sure that I was going to get a map of my brain and it would look like a street map of New Orleans: logically laid out, but you have to look at it in a very twisted way. I got no such pleasure. Instead, I was greeted with a very blasé workspace with “New Map” in yellow in the middle of the page.
…thinking to myself, “WTF, jo0?” So, I took a quick trip over to Wikipedia.org to see what they had to say on the subject
…and their opinion was that it was supposed to look like this rare tropical plant thing from Little Shop of Horrors. Oooookay, so a little quick reading (skimming mostly… I think that I can type faster than I can read and I’m not that fast of a typist) on the topic and I was ready to return to the program to give it another good fair chance. Okay, in my brain dropping moments ago, I alluded to my typing skills being poor. That may be a bit exaggerated, I’m really a pretty adequate typist. Not quite legal secretary fast, but faster than your mother (unless your mum’s a legal secretary). I can also touch type (no hunt and peck typing for me) which helps immensely with this program. It’s not required, but it helps. On with it… arghhhh!
What this program does is helps you to build one of these “Mind Maps” by utilizing a mouse and keyboard shortcuts. It’s also great for brainstorming exercises and general non-linear notes (categorizing disassociated ideas about a single project for instance). I’m sort of a keyboard pilot, and constantly reaching over for the mouse while I’m trying to type out a brainstorm is just going to kill my buzz by losing the last bulleted idea. Some of the keyboard shortcuts are:
“a” – adds a new branch to the selected item
“s” – collapses/expands the selected item branch (toggle)
“Enter” – starts editing the selected item text.
The arrow keys navigate through the tree rather intuitively. Everything else, you can play with it and have some fun making a mind map. I actually used this program the day after I found it to take minutes in an advisory meeting. VYM has a built-in export to XML format for viewing in web pages (or for copy and pasting into Word like I had to do for the technically stubborn) which spit out 8 pages of outlines from a hour long meeting. I had to organize the map a little bit after the meeting, but I was very impressed with the results.
Supposedly it helps you learn better by allowing both sides of your brain to play with your notes instead of just your left side. That being said, this software does not work miracles. It’s fun to play with and although I’m not reticent to taking notes, I don’t use Document Editors to keep structured ideas in order. I find text editors too cumbersome to copy and paste text around with. I’ve never found a good program to work with which can keep up with my random brain ordering. VYM is fun to use (as fun as taking notes can be expected) and an interesting way to work through problems or to work out ideas. It will NOT take your notes for you, a feature lacking from just every other software as well, and it falls short on the “click here to learn everything automatically,” plugins, but VYM is easy to learn given the effort to time ratio.
Get it and play with it. It’s free! It’s Open! It’s….
