Link mindmaps and tasks in Ayoa

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The link between mindmaps and tasks in Ayoa enables you both to break down a subject into next actions, or to build up a mind map from the nodes of a kanban grid.

One of the interesting functions that I discovered, as part of my Evaluation of Ayoa, is the dynamic link between mindmaps and tasks.

Creating relationships between ideas generates more ideas. This is the heart of creativity. Mindmap links to create new ideas.

The mind functions through association. Brain structures are neural connections. Creativity comes from creating links between different areas, by the association of ideas.

Mapping systems like creativity neural processes generates new links leading to new creative visions of previously obvious data.

We talk a lot about how mind maps can enhance creativity. But what could be behind this idea?

Indeed, we talk about ‘new-age’ tools such as Twitter stimulating creativity for similar reasons. The links and associations between ideas and people stimulate the brain into creating new ideas.

Mindmap links to create new ideas

Tools such as mind maps, concept maps, entity relationships, brainstorming diagrams or class diagrams promote these associations. However, what process is the brain going through as we help it here?

Imagine a set of unconnected ideas that on the surface, perhaps, the brain has no particular reason to associate. By making those links through the external mental process of mapping, the brain has something to work on. It’s a whole new ball-game. 

The brain can reinforce these associations to calculate new conclusions and thus: create. Creativity comes out of the association of ideas, but in systems thinking, there are also tools to map processes. These provide new, holistic visions of the system.

Link between mindmaps and tasks in Ayoa

The link between mindmaps and tasks in Ayoa is dynamic because you can both break down a mind map into tasks so a top-down approach, or you can use it bottom-up approach collect content in Evernote tag it Ayoa, organise it into a task board and then connect into the top-down mind map.

So top-down meets bottom-up meeting in a single mind map.

This seems fundamentally important to me. Philosophically it’s Aristotle meets Plato, but in practice, it’s a way of exploiting Evernote, by building up notes into a kanban and then linking to a mindmap.

Evernote is about memorising and categorising things, events, facts material and content over the course of your life and work. You end up therefore with an Evernote library. Go through that library, tagging common items.

You can then bring them up into Ayoa as a kanban overview, organise them, and then mind map them. They’re also there organised ready to be organised into a workflow and actioned as part of Getting Things Done.

So you analyse top-down from one central mind map all the way down to Evernote leaves, and you can build up your Evernote leaves into a pyramid with a central theme on top.

This is seeing the whole from its component parts, and dividing the whole into its component parts, or top down and bottom up analysis.

The objective is better analysis, although there is something missing. To make the whole from components, you still need the human touch to fill in the gaps.

Generating projects from Evernote

This is an approach to ‘generating projects’. If Evernote stocks your issues on a certain subject, then you can tag those items say ‘software issues’, tag them all ‘Ayoa’ and address all ‘software issues’ in one go.

Evaluation of Ayoa

Ayoa is a rich and varied environment which provides whiteboarding, flowcharts, mindmapping, work breakdown structures, visual modelling, and synchronisation with Evernote, See a fuller article on the evaluation of Ayoa as a project designer or a full-blown task manager.