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social, health, political imagery through the lens of G J Huba PhD © 2012-2021

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One of the things that has frustrated me in the past six months is that as I look back over 60 years, I would like to be able to organize much of the information I accumulated in mind maps into something that looks like a time line. I did learn a while ago about the absolutely fantastic time line mind maps developed by Hans Buskes (@hansbuskes on Twitter; http://mastermindmaps.wordpress.com/) and  Philippe Packu (@IPhilVeryGood on Twitter; http://www.drawmeanidea.com/). These guys have some incredible examples. Far beyond my artistic ability.

So I kept using regular mind maps with a first branch being a year or range of years. The example below shows my reactions to the presidencies of the individuals who served as POTUS during my lifetime. But, notice a little trick I introduced. Instead of the year branch coming directly out of the central idea, I have a “blank” or filler branch and then the time period branch comes out of that. No big deal. Just like a regular mind map with a little piece of formatting.

What I discovered is that my adding the extra (padded) branches in the mind maps like those above, it then takes just about 10 minutes (I need more practice) to go from the mind map above to the one below.

All you have to do is turn off the automatic routine for changing the positions of the branches and drag them around a little. You get the the nice straight line by pinning each of the extra padded branches along a straight line and then letting little time-cluster mind maps grow at the various temporal nodes. Takes almost no time. (Ok, so I did stop and do a little font and picture formatting but it is no big deal). All of these good things happen because the program I used (iMindMap) has a feature that permits you to pin some or all of the branches into specific places. In this case you just have to pin the one padded branch for each of the time nodes.

Want a 3D timeline? Hit the button in iMindMap and you can have one like that below. Note that you also can treat the timeline as a “regular” iMindMap in terms of changing fonts, colors, styles, and adding clip art and images. Kind of cool. I was heavily influenced by the work of Hans and Philippe: this is my attempt to simplify it.

Want a timeline presentation? Yup. There’s a button for that too.

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One of the very best apps on my Mac is Fantastical. You use it conjunction with the default Apple calendar. Want to make a calendar entry in the future? Just type “Bob next Thursday at 4pm.” Or type “Bob every Thursday at 4pm until 4:20pm.” Or “Bob every 25th day of month at 2pm.” Or Bob “On the Thursday after President’s Day in 2015 from 4pm until 7pm.” Mac, a couple of bucks. If you synch your calendars via iCloud, the appointment will be on your iPhone and iPad before you can open the calendar. Got it? Get it. Saves huge amounts of time and also removes an obstacle to calendaring. I’ve been using it for months and would never take it off my MacBook.