What Is Mindjet > Customer Stories > Interviews

My name is Thomas Deitenbach. I’d been living in Berlin for 20 years and am now a citizen of Strassenhaus, a little village in Germany half way from Frankfurt to Köln. I’m a Manufacturing Mechanical Engineer and Certification Auditor. Since 1986, I’ve been in the Quality Management sector, first as a student and now as a full-time professional. I like my profession because it touches every aspect of a business. My favorites business areas include process management and training. Both fields give me a huge opportunity to exercise my creative skills. When consultants are successful in these areas, clients will love them because they will make the clients’ work lives easier.

MindManager is my program of choice for nearly everything in my professional life. When I have a new task to complete, I first use MindManager to structure it. Very often, I continue working in maps, although I export the contents to Microsoft Office for my clients to use. With my work in quality management, I deal with very large amounts of information. Every process, rule and defined document is presented to my colleagues as well as our customers. I also export every mind map to a Website to show the information to all the team members involved.

How do you handle “information overload”? One of my main tasks as a consultant is to organize information. For example, when I‘m creating an audit, I’m writing down anywhere from between 20 and 50 pages of information which include up to 700 separate thoughts. Next I have to show evidence that my audit is complete. I do this by linking my notes to norm references with MindManager’s text markers. Lastly I have to write the actual report. This has to be done following particular processes and workflow. Without MindManager’s text markers and power filter features, I’d need a lot more time to do my documentation. MindManager enables me to create everything I need without delay.

I recently created a MindManager 8 map called “Self Management” that I wanted to use to show people how to organize information within a mind map. Often, I start projects by first conducting a web search within a browser outside a MindManager map, but the results I got were very long lists of information. Now I can use the “Web Services” feature in MindManager 8 to do the same Web search inside of a map. Additionally, I can limit the number of results I receive. I started with a Web search with the keyword phrase "Zen to done.” The results gave me inspiration to look for related items such as “Self Management,” hence the title of my map.

One challenge that I faced in my role when I started working as an auditor of certification management systems was having limited time for handling lengthy handwritten notes and full reports. For a long time, I searched for a good audit program and even thought about programming one myself. This was the moment when I started to explore MindManager and discovered the beginning of a very successful approach--combining Quality Management with MindManager. I’m just beginning to create the contents and the modules I’ll need to have easy access to management systems and tools. But for my consulting projects, I already use MindManager frequently. My customers seem to be convinced when they see MindManager at work and many now use it on their own. I’ve actually created a new Website called "MindQuality.net.” Within the next few months, you’ll find new template maps corresponding to Quality Management. And if you’re interested, you’ll be able to order customized maps as well.

If someone were to create a mind map with me as the central topic, it would feature my friends, my Labrador Gino and my hobbies of photography, marionettes and airships. I’d pepper it with images of coffee, mind maps, music, dolphins and dreams. My map would involve all the colors of the rainbow and would also have one growing branch displaying my hopes of: searching for a livable vision, a new social and environmental agreement and a future that is worth working for.