• SimCAMM Rules – Steps 3 to 7 of 10

  Filed under Barristers, Law Lecturers, Law Students, Practising Lawyers, Trial Lawyers
  Feb 13
  

  "Park" your mind map ... and let it simmer!!

  CLICK HERE to download a PDF copy of the SimCAMM Rules.

  STEP 3: Briefly ‘Reorganise’ Your Mind Map

  After you’ve dumped a fair amount of your content onto your mind map, or even as you go, quickly reorganize your mind map on the screen to ensure your mind map is easily readable and ‘makes sense’. This will help prompt you with even more ideas for additional branches.

  STEP 4: ‘Park’ and Allow to ‘Simmer’

  If your mind map does not need to be delivered or used immediately, I highly recommend that you complete your first draft of the mind map as quickly as possible (this includes ‘dumping’ all the information into a mind map and moving branches around to avoid overlapping).

  Then ‘park’ your mind map for either a few hours or, preferably, about 24 hours. When you park your mind map you allow your mind to disconnect from the topic at a conscious level and it allows your subconscious to dwell on the information you have extracted.

  STEP 5: ‘Jot’ Down Any Thoughts and Ideas While Your Mind Map is ‘Parked’

  When you park your mind map, print out a copy of what you have produced so far and carry it around with you so that when you have an ‘inspired thought’ you can quickly ‘jot’ it down on your draft mind map. Don’t continuously refer to your draft mind map throughout the day. Just let your subconscious ‘simmer’ on the ideas but carry the print out with you so that all your ideas can be recorded efficiently in one place on the mind map.

  You will find that in almost ALL cases, when you come back to review your mind map you will find that valuable new ideas ‘pop’ into your mind to add to your mind map and you may find new ways to arrange the information that makes your mind map even easier to understand.

  STEP 6: ‘Amend’ Your Mind Map to Include Ideas You ‘Jot’ Down

  When you come back to your mind map, add into your mind map all the ideas, if any, that you recorded on your printed draft mind map during your ‘park and simmer’ phase.

  Be sure to do this quickly too. It’s not time to create a work of art …yet. That comes later. Mind mapping is all about converting ideas or information from other sources into an incredibly condensed and powerful mind map that is easy to read, review, understand, remember, present with and much more.

  STEP 7: ‘Re-Sort’ Your Mind Map

  Now that you’ve ‘dumped’ your content into a mind map and amended/updated it, it’s important to ‘re-sort’ the information on your mind map so that the information on each branch is located in the right place and your information flows around your central theme in logical sequence.

  If you think your mind map needs improvement, this task will simply be a matter of dragging and dropping your branches in different locations provided you are using a quality computer mind mapping program.

  Tagged as: law student, mind map, mind mapping, mind mapping laws, SimCAMM Rules
  
  2 Comments

2 Responses to “SimCAMM Rules – Steps 3 to 7 of 10”

1. 

   oliver caviglioli said on February 14th, 2010 at 7:23 PM

   Step 7 is what makes or breaks a mind map. And Buzan is very poor at both teaching this and emphasising its importance. In schools, children find it very hard to identify these super-ordinate concepts that capture the essence of the words in the following smaller branches. It is simply down to what Aristotle taught us: set theory of categorisation. Exactly the same sort of thinking as you get in essay outlines and tree diagrams. Nothing esoteric or new age. Nor even creative but essential. Otherwise, all you get is a Cluster (words written in bubbles and connected simply with association not hierarchical categorisation as written about in 1983 by Gabriella Rico in her book on creative writing). Have a look at my website (and bookshop) to see our very straight-forward approach that we use with school students and, as a result of this organisational training, get their grades up immediately.

2. 

   Mike Krsticevic said on February 15th, 2010 at 7:58 AM

   Oliver, I note your point and I believe it is valid.

   Maybe I made an assumption that shouldn’t have been made but it was my understanding that when you first create a mind map you immediately start to think about how ideas connect and what that means in the scheme of the central purpose. I can see your point that this may not be the case and that Step 7 (Re-Sort your Mind Map) is an important step that adds significantly to the learning experience.

   I am not affiliated with Dr Buzan but I do believe that so much of his great work has allowed us to all benefit from a different form of thinking that far exceeds anything that was previously codified. If we get to add to that great foundation with improvements in various areas, all the better. If we get to take the next leap forward into a new way of thinking that exceeds mind mapping, I’m all ears too. Life is too short to be spent doing things unnecessarily inefficiently.

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