looking for inverted outlining tool for goal-orientated planning

Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 24, 2016 at 11:12 PM

Many thanks for all the suggestions. I did check most of them out, but for the time being I’ve decided to trial the aforementioned system using MindMup 1.0 (as opposed to 2.0, which doesn’t seem to be fully featured yet).

What appeals to me about MindMup is its minimalism and ease of use, and that I can set it to open a file directly from Google Drive automatically as I launch Chrome every morning, regardless of which machine I’m using, and thus it reminds me to review it regularly.

There is an internal MindMup extension called “Straight Lines,” which, if you enable it, uses straight lines to connect the nodes from left to right towards the single “goal” node, making it look like a kind of a fishbone diagram.

@jaslar

Indeed, Freeplane could be a good choice if I didn’t need the cross-platform availability on my Chromebooks.

@Paul

Yes, Goalscape is interesting. I like the idea that it’s a zero sum game out of 100%, so it forces you to balance work-family-leisure. But I really wanted to try this fishbone shape first, to see if I can use it as a kind of a reverse decision tree, to eliminate projects and tasks that don’t contribute to the ultimate goal(s), by tracing direct lines of impact.

I might have to look into TheBrain again. But for now I like the 2D simplicity of MindMup for this.

@Alexander

Would you still have a link for that article?

MindMeister does seem to be able to do what I was after, it’s just something about its look and feel that eventually swayed me towards MindMup again.

@mnf

Comapping does look pretty good, but I’m actually looking for a right-to-left hierarchy, and I wasn’t able to reverse that in Comapping.