Donate To The Empire:

So Mind Maps are all the rage now days, and everyone is using these things to plan their lives, conferences, business meetings, whatever. I’ve got no time for that pansy business oriented rigamarole, so I use Mind Maps to organize my Jiu Jitsu strategy. That’s right, your benevolent Emperor is also a hardened student of the Martial Arts. Well, a gleeful hobbyist anyways… And what sort of software might so well rounded a renaissance man as myself use for such a purpose? Why FreeMind of course.

FreeMind is, of course, free and open source. It’s also incredibly easy to use. As long as you have Java installed you can just grab it, run the installer, open it, click on Format, then Automatic Layout and begin creating. It magically handles color coding and hierarchies for you. The one annoyance I could find is that there is no way for two parents to share a child item. You can connect them with a visual line, but it’s not quite the same. I whipped the below BJJ RoadMap up in about an hour, and that included learning how to use the software.