Mind mapping

I've been meaning to blog for a while on mind mapping, but I see that Tim Sneath has blogged about it here.

If you have the right sort of mind, mind mapping is an amazing tool for helping you thing around the problem.  Luckily for us, developers tend to have this sort of mind.  It's simliar in a way to blogging - as you have a thought you write it down, then that cues you into other thoughts, which you write down, then you have another thought related to something you were thinking about ten minutes ago, so you find the original thought and add your new thought to that.  At the end of the process (if there is an end!) is a far more concrete understanding of what the problem is all about.

Rather than reading about it, you can download a tool and play with it!  MindJet (http://www.mindjet.com/) has a mindmapping tool that is pretty damn good.  I use it virtually every day.