In today’s world, households with both parents working are common. As a result, those in charge of family meals must balance planning them with busy work schedules and little time to do so. For these parents, having an organized way to plan meals ahead of time is extremely helpful and time saving, and a Visual Mind Mapping tool may be just the needed thing. With Visual Mind Maps, parents can organize a week’s worth of family meals into one, highly creative, and conceptual diagram. In addition, parents can make use of the colors, graphics, and images in one spatially formatted Visual Mind Map, to make meal planning easier and more intuitive. Thus, busy parents can use Visual Mind Maps to make the process of organizing daily meals something they can effortlessly fit into their schedules.
What are Visual Mind Maps and How Are They Created?
A Visual Mind Map is “a means of organizing information that allows individuals to create diagrams, pictures, and other graphic visuals in order to show the relationship between ideas or other types of information”. With a Visual Mind Map, the creator makes use of colors and symbols to construct the map and represent his or her ideas in a non-linear format. When creating a Visual Mind Map, the individual usually begins by showing the key concept or main idea of the information as a graphic image, located in the center of the map. Any themes surrounding the main idea are shown on “branches” that are attached to the central image. Subsequent themes of less importance are then attached to these branches using “child branches”, and so on. The resulting diagram is a “map” of the ideas and information presented that includes the images, visual graphics, and colors the individual associates with each of the themes and ideas.
Planning Meals for the Upcoming Week Using a Visual Mind Map
A busy parent has been struggling to stay on top of planning delicious and nutritious meals for her family. She, therefore, decides to ease her struggle by using a Visual Mind Map to help her plan meals for the upcoming week. She begins constructing her map by placing a representative image in the map’s center. She then divides the map into sections representing each weekday via “branches” that she attaches to the central image. The parent then asks her family members to suggest food items they would like to eat during the week and lists the items on “child branches”. She continues listing suggested items on the “child branches” until she has a grouping of items for each day that make a complete meal. Throughout the Visual Mind Map, the parent uses colors and images to make the meals easier for her to conceptualize and remember. When she has completed her map, it looks similar to the attached Visual Mind Map diagram.
A Successful Week of Family Meals Thanks to the Visual Mind Map
Each day during the following week, the parent has no trouble preparing meals for her family. Having “mapped out” ahead of time what the family will eat each day, she finds she can easily take care of doing so. The map’s spatial layout makes consulting the map for the each day’s meal simple, and the highly associative visuals in the map make remembering what items to pick up easy. The result, for the parent, is a stress-free week of ensuring her family gets daily nutritious meals that they all enjoy. The parent, thus, finds Visual Mind Mapping a perfect solution to her once problem of figuring out what her family will eat.
