MindMeister: More Features

I posted earlier about the web-based mind mapping software MindMeister. 'Mind Mapping' is a very useful organizational tool. It's perfect for managing small projects and tasks where to-do lists are inadequate but where full blown project management tools would be over-kill. I continue to use MindMeister and find it very useful as a simple project and task manager.

I described how we used this tool as a team to coordinate an office move. I've continued to use it as a task and project management tool and I've discovered a couple of new and useful features. (not sure if they are new or just new to me!) I'll list some of theme here:

• You can email ideas to your map. MindMeister provides you with email addresses that let you either add single items to an existing map or create an entire new map. (sub-items are indicated using indents) Read more about it here here
  
  
  Your emailed items are automatically added to the map
  
  
  
• You can assign tasks to items. This feature has a couple of benefits. First, you can use this feature to divide tasks up between yourself and your team. Next, you can set up the task to send email reminders. And finally you can subscribe to a task 'feed' enabling you to see your tasks in other applications. (N.B. This feature does not work very well in Outlook as the tasks show up as calendar items rather than task items and all the due dates are at midnight which puts them outside the default view)
  
• You can work with the maps offline. If you'll be without an internet connection, MindMeister lets you sync a copy of the map to your local machine. You can work on it and then re-sync it when you have your service back.

MindMeister is free to use in the basic version. Some features are not available but you can create up to six three maps and collaborate on other peoples' maps. The Premium version is reasonable at $49(US) per year and gives you access to all features and you can create any number of maps.

If you ever feel overwhelmed by all the tasks and ideas you have to keep track of - then give this a try.