MindManager for Managing an Academic Laboratory
July 11, 2019
MindManager for Managing an Academic Laboratory
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MindManager
I use MindManager in three main ways (1) setup a weekly dashboard for activities and goals (2) organize specific collaborations including, tasks, milestones, etc and (3) to help write papers and grants. For the latter I use MindManager to generate outlines for different sections of grants and papers and fill in details either as topics or associated notes
- Strategic Planning
- Brainstorming
- Process Mapping
- Education & Training
- Problem Solving
- Task and Project Management
- Project Planning
- Very easy way to setup a visual "Dashboard" for weekly activities. Much more flexible, interactive and interesting than a simple to-do list
- Great way to organize collaborations with topics for each project goal and individual tasks.
- Great way to generate outlines for papers and grants. Each topic can be a specific section and subtopics are piece of information that need to be put there. Then it's easy to rearrange until the structure and flow of the paper is set. From there the actual writing is much easier
- I would like to be able to readily select groups of topics and apply formatting e.g. circle three topics and have them collectively outlined or colored
- Would be nice to have a small collection of the icons that I use most frequently in a group on the top bar so I can easily drag and drop
- Its a bit cumbersome to generate custom formats
- I've had trouble configuring this latest version to attach emails from Outlook which was a really useful feature for my dashboard
1 to 10
- My weeks are better organized and am therefore more efficient and more productive
- My collaborations are better organized which makes them move quicker and more efficiently.
- Brainstorming for new papers and grants is more efficient with Mindmanager and therefore I spend less time writing.
Its difficult to organize more than a few collaborations with a spreadsheet. My lab has at least a dozen active collaborations at any given time and Mindmanager provides an easy overview of all of my collaborations. This way I can visualize the status of projects e.g. which tasks are underway and which are in the queue. The completion icons and coloring help highlight progress and areas that need attention.
I have colleagues who use MS Project, but it is far too complex and cumbersome and doesn't have the useful visual brainstorming capabilities. I also tried some of the freeware mind mapping programs out there but all had significant deficiencies.