How to make a mind map, with a worked example

To make a mind map, write your topic in the middle of the page, draw four to six branches out from it for the big areas, and add short sub-ideas to each branch. Then mark the few ideas worth doing and move them somewhere they'll get done. That's the whole method, and a first version takes about twenty minutes.

The four steps

1. Name the centre. Use a short noun phrase such as "Product launch". A question or a full sentence in the middle tends to narrow the branches before you've drawn them.
2. Add the main branches. Aim for four to six. With two or three, you're probably describing the topic at too high a level to be useful. With ten, some of those branches are sub-ideas of the others. They don't need to be the right branches yet, because renaming one later costs nothing.
3. Grow the sub-ideas. Add short phrases off each branch, one idea each. Move between branches as ideas come, and leave anything half-formed on the page. The map is for getting things out of your head, and sorting comes after.
4. Pick what to act on. Colour the ideas worth doing and copy them into a task list, a kanban board or a roadmap. A map that stops at step three is a nice picture of what you already knew.

One note on wording. Tony Buzan, who made the term popular through his 1974 BBC series Use Your Head, promoted key words on colourful, radiating branches. That suits someone studying alone. A team planning work needs a few more words per note, because six people have to read it back the same way next Tuesday. "Support load in week one" says what "support" doesn't.

One map, branch by branch

This example is invented, and it's also the sample on our mind map template, since we make Prompt Board. A small team is planning the launch of a design tool and has twenty minutes to work out what it has forgotten. You can draw the same map on paper.

The centre is Product launch, and the finished map looks like this:

• Audience
  • Freelance designers
  • Small agencies
  • Teachers
• Channels
  • Newsletter
  • Product Hunt
  • YouTube demo
• Pricing
  • Free tier
  • Team plan
  • Annual discount
• Risks
  • Late onboarding flow
  • Support load in week one
• Launch day
  • Post at 9:00 CET
  • Founders answer comments
  • Track sign-ups hourly
• After launch
  • Interview ten users
  • Fix top three issues

That's six branches and 16 sub-ideas: three each on Audience, Channels, Pricing and Launch day, and two each on Risks and After launch. On the board, three branches sit on each side of the centre, so nobody has to read around a circle.

How it grew

The team started with Audience, Channels and Pricing, because those are the branches every launch plan has. Ten minutes in, those three were full and the map looked finished.

Asking what would go wrong produced Risks. Writing "Support load in week one" raised the question of who'd answer people on the day, which led to a Launch day branch with "Founders answer comments". Nobody had planned for any of that. Reaching a new branch by way of an old one is the reason to draw a map and not write a list, since a list has only the next line to suggest what comes next.

After launch came last and stayed short. Two notes on a branch are fine. A branch with one note is often a sub-idea of another branch, and an empty one tells you the team has a question it hasn't thought about.

What came out of it

The team then coloured five of the 16 notes, each one something with work behind it that nobody owned yet:

• Late onboarding flow
• Support load in week one
• Newsletter
• YouTube demo
• Interview ten users

The other 11 stayed on the map uncoloured. Some were decisions already made, such as the free tier. Others could wait. The five went onto a kanban board that afternoon, each with a name on it. If you need to choose among more than a handful, an impact effort matrix helps with the sorting.

Paper, a shared board or an AI draft

On paper a mind map is fast and needs nothing. Turn the page sideways and start in the middle. It works best alone or with two people at one table, and it's hard to reorganise once it's full.

On a shared board several people can add notes at once, so it suits a team, especially a remote one. On Prompt Board you start from the template, rename the centre and the branches, and join new notes with connectors, which stay attached when you drag things around. One honest limit: mind maps don't lay themselves out yet. The template and the AI draft arrive neatly arranged, but notes you add after that go wherever you put them, so a growing map needs some tidying by hand.

With an AI draft you type one sentence and get a first map to react to. In Prompt Board's AI dialog, pick the Mind map tab. It asks the model for one topic, four to six branches and two to four sub-ideas on each. The template page suggests "Mind map for launching a podcast about remote work, with branches for guests, format, promotion and gear". A draft works well for catching what you've missed, and our guide to briefing an AI whiteboard shows what to put in the sentence. If the point of the session is to hear what your team thinks, have them write first, because a ready-made draft steers people towards its own branches.

Mind map or something else?

A mind map has one centre, and everything hangs off it in a tree. That shape suits breaking down one topic, and it's a poor fit for some other jobs.

When ideas connect across branches and those connections matter, use a concept map. It can have several main concepts and usually labels its links. A paper quoted in Wikipedia's article puts the difference in one line: "a mind map has only one main concept, while a concept map may have several."

When steps happen in order and there are decisions along the way, use a flowchart. When you're looking for why a problem keeps happening, a fishbone diagram keeps a group from settling on the first explanation. When you have one question and want many answers before any structure, a brainstorming board gives the ideas a wall and a shortlist.

Frequently asked questions

What is a mind map?

A diagram with one topic in the middle and ideas branching out from it, each branch carrying its own sub-ideas. It shows how the parts of a topic relate to the whole, and it's quick to change while you're still thinking.

Who invented the mind map?

Tony Buzan made the term popular with his 1974 BBC series Use Your Head and its companion book. Radial diagrams of this kind are much older than the name, so he's better described as the person who made them widely known.

How many branches should a mind map have?

Four to six suits most topics. Our template has six, and Prompt Board's AI draft aims for four to six with two to four sub-ideas each. If you have more, look for branches that belong under another one.

What is the difference between a mind map and a concept map?

A mind map is a tree around one central topic. A concept map can have several main concepts, links between any of them and labels that say how they relate. Use a mind map to break a topic down, and a concept map to explain how its parts affect each other.

Start your own map

Pick something you're planning this month and give it twenty minutes. Open the mind map template, type your topic over "Product launch", and rename the six branches before you fill them. Finish by colouring what you'll act on, then share the board link with whoever has to do it.