Tony Buzan is often hailed as the ‘Inventor of Mind-maps.’ He has formed an incredible team at ThinkBuzan, has put together some amazing material on the art of Mind-Mapping and has even built a company around teaching others to teach the principles of effective mind-mapping. I do want to point out however, that artists have been mind-mapping since the beginning days of songwriting. Ever since King David penned the Psalms of the Bible, song-writers would seek to convey the message of a song through visual imagery. In their mind they would piece together a message of a song from the plethora of visual imagery that they had experienced throughout their life, making comparisons and metaphors wherever they could. Many simile’s from King David’s psalms portray striking imagery, for instance, “For the LORD God is a sun and shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” King David knew of the shield, as he was a warrior, and he know of the sun, which he could see from the ground he stood on as he looked up into the sky during the day. iMindMap delivers and incredible platform for artists to map out the imagery they want to share within a song. What I like about the newly updated Rap Genius is that they have a callout section on the right site that explain the lyrics and even an HTML editor where people can put in the pictures and the videos.
As you can see lyrics have tons of visual points to them, and if you’re mapping out the subjects and the messages you’re trying to get across when you are writing a song there is no better program that you can use than using iMindMap. I’ve used it many times to write songs and I was able to come up with lyrics that I could have never come up with without the use of these features. Even after you create a song, if you’re trying to think of ways to market it, if you’re thinking of ideas of what to do for the music videos, if you’re thinking of anything pertaining to your music career, using iMindMap will give you the cutting edge you need to literally turn your thoughts into weapons.
DropTask is another story…
In a galaxy very close, inside of the microcosm of the reality you live in, there’s something that is very similar to what in ‘Star Wars,’ they call the Force, and that my friends, is Focus. We’re all looking to take our lives to new heights, and we’re all finding it difficult to keep focused… in fact, we’re all struggling to leverage our time and energy before the sand in the hourglass runs out in our lives. Many times we don’t realize that there needs to be a drastic change in our thinking and habits until something emotional, perhaps traumatizing happens; perhaps you’re on the verge of losing a loved one, perhaps you’re having fights over finances, and it hits you… There’s some major projects you need to get done, and by now, should have already finished, but you’re hardly even started, and thoughts of hundreds of things that need to be done start to flood through your mind, causing you to feel overwhelmed. All is not lost, take courage, because there’s plenty of areas that you’re succeeding at due to the good habits that you’ve developed over the years… however there’s plenty of bad habits, however small, perhaps misuse of your time, perhaps going to bed too late, and not waking up an hour earlier where you could spend time working out, building a vision board, or sending out a bunch of e-mails asking for help from the experts, perhaps it’s that you don’t have a team of people you meet with everyday to work towards your biggest dreams, perhaps it’s just the fact that you don’t believe it can be done, and you need to pray more often and speak out loud some empowering affirmations.
Whether it’s any of those or whether you’re doing all of those already, DropTask is here to completely eliminate the feeling of “Overwhelm.” One of the best task management applications for the creative right brain thinker, DropTask also syncs up with iMindMap, which I wrote about in a previous article in an effort to encourage you to use it to think of entirely new lyrics and concepts for song ideas that you may have. Those I’ve shown my DropTask to, and have invited to be an editor in, have been amazed at how effective it is, at how cool it is to look at, and how it allows everyone to see the Big Picture. DropTask was developed so you can stay focused and at the same time keep your eye on the prize.
I would like to make one final Star Wars alliteration before I give you the link for where you can sign-up, so bear with me. Imagine a Gigantic Bubble with about 20 Larger Bubbles inside and about 20 Smaller Bubbles within each of the Larger Bubbles, that means there’s around 400 bubbles that make up the Gigantic Bubble. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker was able to shoot a missile into an opening in the Gigantic Bubble to take out one of the Smaller Bubbles within one of the Larger Bubbles, and by taking out that one bubble it caused a chain reaction that caused the Gigantic Bubble to explode.
Now think about that for a moment, without them knowing what Smaller Bubbles were in the Larger Bubbles that were in the Gigantic Bubble, they would not have know the Gigantic Bubble’s weakness. I propose this theory, that there are plenty of Gigantic Bubbles in each of our lives, and in some people’s lives the Gigantic Bubbles actually turn into Real Life Death Stars! Let’s now give colors to the bubbles; imagine there’s a very worthy goal of “Finding a New Girlfriend” and that’s a Green Bubble – and now let’s imagine a Red Bubble called “Maintaining My Car” and inside there’s a smaller bubble called “Change My Oil.” Now let’s imagine you’ve set up a date with a beautiful new girl, and you get in your car to go pick her up, and your engine dies, you’re stuck in the middle of no where, she get’s pissed, your car’s broken, and you’re wishing you had changed your oil months before and took care of that smaller bubble within the “Maintaining My Car.” So the Red Bubble blows up the Green Bubble, or at least your current attempt at knocking out some of the smaller bubbles in the Green Bubble. There’s plenty of ways you can apply this to your life. A couple more examples would be; if you have some car tickets which are not paid, and it adds up and goes to collections and you try to get your license back but there are all these fee’s holding you back from getting it, and that destroys your job because your not able to drive, or even a better example; alcoholism which would need to be dealt with by going to a counselor or joining AA not taken care of could destroy precious relationships in your life, or even a better example; needing to study and not doing it and when test time comes you fail because you didn’t study and that destroys the whole summer where you need to re-take the class to make it up. On and on we can go on like this giving example at how the Gigantic Bubbles can actually turn into real life Death Star’s destroying our valuable time and relationships. Let’s take the preemptive strike, let’s analyze those Gigantic Bubbles, and find out their weaknesses. My theory is that every Gigantic Bubble has it’s ‘Reactor Core’ weakness, and that once identified, taking out that ‘Reactor Core’ Bubble, however small it may be, will cause the chain reaction to destroy the Gigantic Bubble and free up your time to focus on the highest priorities like spending time with your loved ones, learning a new language, mastering your trade, or writing cool articles like this one! My encouragement is to try this out, color code your bubbles, find out what constitutes them, and figure out where the ‘Reactor Core’s’ are and take them out, clearing up more mental space and allowing you to be more pro-active, and less re-active.
Now Ayoa combines both DropTask and iMindMap into the perfect software! What’s not to love?
Check out Ayoa!
