What Is Mindjet > Customer Stories > Interviews

Chris Blatnick
Collaborative Technologies Architect,Interface Matters

I am originally from Arizona but have lived in Cleveland, Ohio for the last ten years, working as a Collaborative Technologies Architect. I’m involved with technologies and products that help people share information in a more streamlined fashion, building business applications that enable employees within a company to share information faster and more efficiently. I founded two blogs, Interface Matters, focused on collaborative technologies and interface design, and Maplicious, devoted to building and sharing a gallery of fun and creative mind maps. On a personal note, I am married with three kids. My son just started high school and we also have two daughters; one in seventh grade and one in fifth grade. They usually keep me pretty busy. My youngest daughter is autistic, so that adds even more to the fun and excitement because we’re always trying to help her with what she needs to be successful. From that perspective, MindManager has helped me a great deal in the information I track on a personal level. As far as hobbies go, I enjoy going to concerts, reading, playing paintball and most of all spending time with my family.

I first learned about mapping in college. I got really hooked on it but the problems were: 1) I was mapping on paper, which seemed cumbersome, especially when I wanted to edit information and 2) My artistic skills are such that I have a hard time drawing a stick figure. I really believe technology makes us more productive, so when I acquired my first Tablet PC I immediately looked for tools I could use to stimulate its ink functionality and that’s when I came across MindManager.

I use MindManager on a personal level to manage my day -to -day activities. For example, I map my children’s sports schedules, their school subjects and their teacher information. I also track a lot of my household items in a map. I’ve got filing cabinets with all my stuff in the proper places and my contacts are well organized, but these items were all scattered around in relation to each other. So I started to bring more of that kind information into MindManager maps by creating my own personal dashboards. An example is my financial dashboard. Credit card numbers and policies and bank account information went in the map. I brought all of the information together into a single map to provide one place to go. MindManager is a portal into everything related to my life.

On a professional level, I try to use MindManager for just about everything. I’ll capture meeting minutes, especially at IBM. 55% - 60% of our workforce is remote, so most of us conduct meetings online and through teleconferences. In my role, I also track projects for customers. I create one map per customer and in that map I capture to-do items and any issues that they’re having. MindManager provides me with clarity around what I have to do more than anything else. MindManager has allowed me to stay on top of the various tasks that I have more efficiently than just using a straight linear task manager. That alone has saved me a lot of time. Being able to capture all of the information about a customer in one place is crucial and allows me to do more in less time!

A particularly memorable moment I had sharing maps with colleagues happened at a previous employer. I was a part of the international development team with representatives from over 20 countries. Periodically, we’d gather for a symposium to share information and educate each other on what we were working on.

In one of our meetings, we were going through the methodology of a case study. After we read through it, we had to break up into small groups and summarize our thoughts and action items to take from the analysis. I happened to have MindManager on my computer and in a relatively short time, I volunteered to be the group’s note-taker and had captured the ideas everyone was throwing out in my map. I then projected the map, rearranged topics, added notes, callouts, map markers, images, etc., to represent the case study we were discussing.

We reconvened later and each team presented their findings. Everyone else just stood up and read off note cards or the whiteboard. My team got up there, plugged in my laptop, threw the map into ‘Presentation Mode’ and blew everyone away. Not only had we captured all the in-depth ideas we’d had, but we also showed the visual nature of our thought processes. Many people told me afterwards that seeing the map helped them clarify the main points of the case study more than everyone else who had presented in a traditional way.

I think MindManager 8 is pretty compelling. As a developer working with collaborative technologies, I’m very interested in the concepts of “mashups” -- being able to take information from a bunch of disparate places and bringing them together. The new ‘Web Services’ feature in MindManager 8 is just the beginning of taking mind maps to a new level. I think the other feature in MindManager 8 that will accelerate my productivity in terms of project tracking is the ‘Task Automation’ feature. The concept of rolling up and automatically updating the dependencies between different tasks in a project (whereas before you had to go in and do that manually), it’s pretty huge!

If someone created a map with me as the Central Topic it would look like a patchwork quilt that 20 different people designed. I’m very eclectic; I have a lot of interests and hobbies. My friends tell me I’m quite dichotomous. For example, I love loud, aggressive music and I like going to concerts, but I’m also generally a rather quiet and reserved person. People look at me as a “typical computer guy,” but are usually quite surprised that I primarily listen to heavy metal , which is not really typical of that categorization. But I also love jazz and classical music, so there is that dichotomy again. I really enjoy playing paintball. I love getting out in the woods, crawling around so that I can get a good shot on someone. On the other hand, I absolutely hate getting dirty. I’m really annoyed by the beach, for example, since sand gets everywhere. Even my wife, who has been with me for 20 years, still can’t figure me out. I like to keep people guessing.