Chad Capps

July 17, 2008

As a manager of engineers I had a recurring problem. There is a wealth of information needed for my job as well as for those engineers on my team. The problem is that we have too much information to readily remember, much of which we need just infrequently enough that it is easy to forget where it is located.

My company, as most do, prefers to spend as little money as possible on software and tools, especially those not directly related to a specific project. On the bright side they have supplied us with a list of free tools that we can use where the license has already been approved by our legal folks.

One such tool is Freemind. Freemind makes it easy to record and manage information. It is designed to help you organize that information similar to how you think. It is free.

The website includes screenshots, a features list, documentation, a download location, and more.

Freemind enables you to create information in a tree structure. Or if you prefer you can think of it as subjects and sub-subjects. Each leaf or node/branch in the tree can be text or one of many kinds of links. Links can be to a document on your company network, a link to a webpage, link to a Share Point portal, and so on.

There are many methods of changing the look of nodes or branches so that they have extra meaning to you, including font size, font color, node style, etc. You can also annotate nodes with various icons. As an additional aid, the "Help documentation" is created using Freemind itself, which is setup to show you the many features available.

The tree structure can be expanded or collapsed either one branch or node at a time or you can expand the whole tree one layer at a time. Freemind includes a search feature to help you find information in a large file.

For my teams I created a mind map (*.mm = what they call the file type that Freemind creates), which holds links to all the kinds of information that a new employee might need. This helps them get up to speed on our project quickly. The kind of information that is easy to forget where it is located. Before using Freemind we kept this kind of information in a series of emails stored somewhere, but always hard to locate when needed. For example, the location of company salary structure charts, project training, org charts, division resources, project specific information, and so on.

The way I am using it sort of reminds me of a very powerful "Favorites" list like you have in your web browser, but easier to navigate, create, and maintain.

Overall, Freemind is a great tool for rapid brainstorming, conceptualizing, organizing related and semi-related information, keeping ideas, or creating a knowledge base. The software is stable and easy to use. Getting started is as easy as downloading and installing the software, running the program, then beginning your mind map by typing in the name of the root node, pressing "enter", then pressing the "insert" key to create your first branch or sub-subject.

Freemind definitely improved my productivity.