There are times I have to write a longer article, document, or prepare a presentation, where I have no idea how I’m going to get my thoughts structured. This is where document outliner tools come handy.

My primary goal when creating the Mindweb application was, to create a tool for managing my GTD system. As it’s based on standard mindmap functionality, there is no reason not to use it as a document outliner.

Whenever I have to write something lengthy, I go back to what I’ve learned in primary school, and work from outside inwards. I love using mindmaps as document outliners. First of all, I like mindmaps as such, I usually have freeplane installed on my computers, which works on both Windows and Linux.

Mindmap software are designed to be restructured, they have shortcuts to move a topic about, indent-outdent, etc.. They also have an option, to add  content to the topics easily. I usually use nodes to store separate ideas, and write partial content, or keywords as notes to the nodes. When I’m ready, I just export the content to something like the target format, like ODF, DOCX, or in some cases PPT.

Unfortunately Freeplane is not available online, or as an Android application, so it I try using the Mindweb application I’ve developed to provide the mindmap functionality for keeping my GTD system running.

The first tests prove to work pretty well, I only miss the export functionality at the moment. You can see a preliminary test I used Mindweb as an outliner here. You don’t have to register or login to see the outline, as it’s shared publicly.

I’ll work on the outline for a little while, and try to create a post from it sometime later.