Your mental atlas should be a canvas where you can feel free to explore your ideas and connect them together in a very playful way.

• Import ideas into canvas
  1. Choose a topic
     • Open the tool you are going to use to create your mental atlas
     • Write your topic in the middle of the canvas
  2. Import existing ideas tagged as #toCreate from your note-taking system
     • Copy-paste the idea titles into the canvas
• Connect and expand ideas (Diffuse mode of thinking)
  1. Use the combinational creativity and mental maps techniques to connect ideas
  2. Start noticing some clusters of ideas (pattern recognition)
  3. Label each cluster
  4. For the ideas you are not sure how to name or connect:
     1. Label them
     2. Explore additional factors that are not coming from your note-taking system in the first place
     3. Start connecting these additional factors you have found with existing ideas that came from your note-taking system
• Export new ideas to the note-taking system (Focused mode of thinking): channel all the ideas found in the mental atlas and formulate them in a way that makes sense to store inside the note-taking system

  1. Turn the clusters found in the previous phase into something explicitly formulated as an actual sentence so that we can read it back in the future and understand

  2. Export the new ideas.

     • It helps to remember that all these visual maps and trees are very similar to textual trees (nested lists)

  3. Create a new note for each new idea

  4. Tag the new note as #toProcess

  5. Connect the new note with existing notes by using:

     • Indentation
     • Interlinking

     NOTE: Whatever you add back to your note-taking system make sure that it's linked to other ideas. Any orphan note becomes really hard to find and, as such, hard to use for your creative process in general

  6. If you feel particularly inspired, expand on the idea and tag as #toCreate

If you don't have enough starter ideas to import from your note-taking system:

1. Start from your content thesis
2. Map out random thoughts and tangential ideas
3. Visual brainstorming