How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (2003)

Thanks for posting this.

Maps make amazing summarization/summary capturing tools. I used to unknowingly use them during my college days. One of the main reasons why I spent 1/10th the time yet scored the same as my classmates was maps. I would practically convert each chapter into a map, and merely crawling though a map was more than sufficient for any kind of a revision.

In our industry maps make wonderful testing tools. Lets say you want to test X, write down a map of each functionality, then write down further nodes, which basically is what could possible go wrong or right with each node(Each of this becomes a separate node). For each node you expand, stress the node bring out more test nodes until you can't stress any node anymore.

The resultant map will be nearly the best test cases you can come up with.

Now do this before you start coding, and what you will get is all the scenarios you need to handle to make the code bug free.

Additional tip, avoid using map software. Best tools for this kind of work are paper/pen or whiteboard/marker.

I've been using this strategy to write C code for embedded systems. And it works like a charm.

That's very interesting. I foresee a problem with capacity. If you keep everything around eventually you won't be able to move anymore. I'm so happy that I'm beginning to forget some of the stuff from my childhood, to keep carrying that along forever seems like a huge weight. Forgetting is just like remembering: a blessing and a curse at the same time. It would be really nice if our minds could actively forget something (like a file delete on a file system), right now it seems to be mostly governed by some caching rule where the last stage of the cache is /dev/null.

By committing it all to paper (and presumably, by re-reading it) you fire up all those neurons periodically which will lead to you thwarting the garbage collection process. As a consequence eventually you'll either run out of room or possibly end up with mental issues (inability to acquire new stuff or inability to focus due the large number of associations running out from each thought you have).

There is a cost associated with this map making, still, I'm very much tempted to try it to see what the positive effects are.

maybe an image of what the notebook looks like will be very helpful

What map software have you tried and what are your problems with it? Due to my schooling, I find pen and paper better as a thinking tool than map software, but it is not searchable or persistent - two attributes that I really value.

Interesting perspective. I often get annoyed at myself for remember very little from my school years that's not related to my current career or hobbies (e.g. history, geography, English lit) and almost feel that I should learn it all again, but I guess if I don't actually use that knowledge I'd just be forcing myself to memorise facts for the sake of it.

Perhaps it is best that I just let it go and instead focus on learning new things that I really want to learn or that'd be useful for what I do/want to do?

Now if only I could selectively delete memories I could finally forget the time I ended a call to a client with "Love you, bye!".