On a lazy and comfortable weekend morning, when you get up excitedly to prepare a Western-style breakfast for your loved one, you find that there are still two steamed buns and half a box of leftover rice lying in the refrigerator. . When hesitating, if he hears another word of "whatever", the interest he has finally accumulated will suddenly disappear. "What to eat" is a scary topic. It imprisons you between ideal and reality. While it consumes your will and your patience, it makes you watch time fly by before your eyes. Most of the weekends of housewives are spent in endless tangles. Want to clear out inventory but still want to be creative? It’s better to let mind mapping help you make decisions.

First draw a central image of "foodie". Don't worry that you are not good at drawing or can't draw it. You know, most people's drawing level is similar to yours - I drew the central image based on the pictures on the Internet. Even if the copying is not good or ugly, it doesn’t matter, others can’t see it anyway.

For mind maps that organize ideas, when time is tight or you are too lazy to write, the central image can be replaced with text, such as this.

But maps to assist memory are a different matter. Try to make them as beautiful as possible. Although it may take a long time, the process of drawing itself is a process of deepening memory.

Then use thick lines to extend the food that needs to be cleaned outward from the central image. The foods I need to clean up include leftover black sesame filling from making Lantern Festival, pasta that is about to expire, corn flakes and jam. The richer the colors of the lines, the better, so that it is easier to stimulate imagination and creative interest. I chose to draw the lines in the colors of the food itself, which is both relevant and saves brain cells.

Next, you can extend outwards based on the first level of food. For example, making pasta requires meat filling, and a salad should be prepared to go with the pasta, so at the next level of pasta, I wrote down meat filling and salad. The lower the level, the thinner the lines and the smaller the font size to highlight the layering of the mind map.

By analogy, I diverged my thoughts on the remaining three foods. In the process of divergent thinking, the most easily overlooked and most difficult rule to follow is "one branch, one word". Using words instead of short sentences is more conducive to creative ideas and analytical thinking. The more critical the issue, the more attention should be paid to the way of expression. For example, I associate the word salad with tuna and mashed potatoes, but when drawing the picture I make sure to split the phrase into the words tuna and mashed potatoes. In this way, I can associate the two different flavors of tuna and black pepper through mashed potatoes, and avoid solidifying my thinking in an established pattern.

When thinking, you will naturally first think of the ingredients you already have at home. In this way, you can maximize the use of the ingredients at hand and ensure that the diet follows the first-in, first-out principle.

After everything is completed, you can arrange the time according to the currently determined recipes. For example, pasta and cabbage salad are served as lunch on Saturday, while breakfast on Sunday is set to be fermented eggs and glutinous rice balls. In terms of time arrangement, I mainly follow three principles: schedule, family needs and food calories. For example, we have plans to go out on Saturday morning, and at noon we arrange pasta and salads that take less time to cook. As for the dishes that my husband likes, the selection problem can be completely left to him. For example, I am only responsible for arranging which meal to eat Maocai and which meal to eat fish. In terms of calories, I am used to following the principle of higher in the morning and lower in the evening. If you don’t care about your weight, you can decide according to your mood.

By arranging the time, it can be clearly found that the current menu cannot meet the needs of two days on the weekend. For example, it is not sure what to eat on Saturday night, but there is only one dish of meat stuffed with gluten on Sunday night. So I continued to dig into the inventory at home and added curry and fish to the first level of the map.

After all arrangements are made, circle the ingredients you don’t have at home, and you can immediately rush to the supermarket for shopping.

Although mind mapping has become an indispensable tool in my work, I have not thought about applying it to my daily life. It's nothing more than firewood, rice, oil, salt and trivial things. If such a trivial matter requires writing and drawing on paper, it would be too fussy. Now it seems that life is not as easy as imagined, but I lack respect and love for life. If I hadn't calmed down and painted a few strokes, I'm afraid my husband and I would have repeated the scene of big eyes staring at small eyes before eating. This is the wonderful thing about mind mapping. The process of drawing is like walking through a maze in the brain's sulci. You never know what will appear in front of you until the last moment.

Such a weird idea actually comes from the book "Mind Maps in Daily Life". The author Miyuki Yajima is not only an authorized training instructor of Tony Buzan, the founder of mind mapping, but also a Japanese woman. In addition to the "workshop spirit" of perseverance and excellence that Japanese people generally possess, Japanese women are born with an extra level of delicacy. Whether it is storage, handicrafts, or other professions that cannot even be called professions, they can find a set of exquisite methods from day-to-day practice. Now they have brought home the mind maps commonly used by men and children in the workplace and school, and really want to study home life to the extreme.

Probably due to her status as a training instructor, Miyuki Yajima’s focus is not on sophisticated drawing techniques, but on how to help everyone take the first step.

From an enlightenment perspective, Miyuki Yajima is definitely a well-deserved good teacher. In order to reduce everyone's learning pressure, she repeatedly emphasized in the book that as long as we draw mind maps with clear goals, we can adjust the drawing method based on a full understanding of the rules. You know, Tony Buzan, in his book "Mind Mapping", listed 4 major items and 23 minor specific rules only for drawing techniques and layout. For those who are new to mind mapping, it is not easy to memorize and apply all the rules at once. In contrast, the method adopted by Miyuki Yajima is much more flexible. For example, a map can include multiple central images; the lines of the map can not only lead back, but can also be intertwined with other lines; even an incomplete map that is monochromatic or entirely text is acceptable.

Rather than saying "Mind Maps in Daily Life" is a book, it is better to think of it as a vivid case lesson. The book lists a large number of mind maps drawn by students. Each picture is first introduced and explained by the students, and then teacher Miyuki Yajima provides comments on representative issues. Don't underestimate these seemingly simple comments, they are the essence extracted by Miyuki Yajima through drawing and guiding massive maps. When Tony Buzan proposed the 3A (Accept, Apply, Adapt) principle of mind mapping, he specifically emphasized that at least 100 mind maps should be drawn in the application stage. As the saying goes, "Read a book a hundred times and its meaning will appear automatically." Although the teacher cannot do it for you, the targeted guidance and necessary feedback in the book will definitely make learning more effective.

When it comes to the uses of mind maps, there are even more. For yourself, mind mapping is the simplest personal management tool. Not only can you review the past (memo) and look forward to the future (plan), you can also have a dialogue with your subconscious and discover your unknown self. For family members, mind mapping can maintain close relationships (cooperation) and reduce gaps and misunderstandings (communication). In terms of education, mind maps can help children build a learning system (memory) and improve their thinking ability (logic). In terms of work, mind maps can build an information platform (sharing) and assist brainstorming (innovation)... It is no exaggeration to say that there is nothing mind maps can't do except what you can't think of.

Compared with traditional hand-drawing, mind mapping software seems to be more popular among people at present. Software drawing does have the advantages of being quick to get started and high efficiency, but it also inhibits everyone's need to systematically learn drawing rules. Whether it is Tony Buzan or Miyuki Yajima, everyone is encouraged to form their own map style. But Adapt is based on Accept. As Miyuki Yajima said in the book, "The principle of drawing mind maps is the same as playing games. Setting and following certain rules can gain freedom from them." Many authors who use mind mapping software on the Internet obviously do not have the basic knowledge of mind mapping. Not only are the forms the same, but there are also taboos such as no central image and sentences written on branches. This kind of brace-like mind map not only looks boring, but also inevitably greatly reduces the memory effect. Instead of groping haphazardly, it is better to spend an hour or two learning the basic principles and let more friends fall in love with your mind map.