When you start mapping out the people you know and their relationships to you, and one another, interesting things happen. The Brain Blog’s article Everyone Is Connected. It’s Time to See the Links. which describes adding people and mind mapping social networks has several examples of the ways in which you can use PersonalBrain as a tool for mapping. As the article intro says,

If you don’t have your family or colleagues in your Brain you are missing out. Adding people in your Brain whether it’s their name connected to a project or their contact info will help you get the big picture on your relationships. Creating a people centric Brain will improve the quality of your interactions so you can remember key details that might otherwise be forgotten.
I expand the original article with a description of my own practices below.

Further ideas on mapping relationships

Family relationships

In my brain I map family relationships as follows:
  • Husband and wife are linked with a join link
  • Children are linked as child links from each parent, and with join links to each other as siblings.
I don’t use labels as my real brain can keep track of the relationships when it sees them. I may in the future but so far have found no need to.

In the example below we have Donald Duck, his girlfriend Daisy Duck and sister Della Duck (see the full Duck Family for more info on Donald’s relatives).

donald-duck

And if we show Della Duck you’ll see her three sons, Huey, Dewey and Louie. Each is linked to Della as parent and to each other as a sibling.

della-duck

Finally we have Huey as son on Della Duck and brother to Louie and Dewey.

huey

Events

In addition to linking people by workplace or family relationship, I also link them to the events (seminars, training sessions, conferences) where I either met them or attended with them. This helps me connect to our history.

Your connectors

An earlier article describes how I used MindManager to identify the connectors in my network. Unfortunately the graphic has gone to Internet heaven and I’ll have to find the original file.