Pack Map Your Thoughts

A different way to visualize lists and get organized.

It’s not always easy to put thoughts on paper, especially when it’s a long list that needs to be presented in an appealing format.

In my junior year at NC State, a company called Transloc was already well-known around campus for using GPS tracking of student buses to prepare riders for the next arrival. It’s an elegant service because anybody can view the bus fleet in real time as the buses travel their routes, and it’s a nice complement to time charts and schedules.

Transloc cofounder Josh Whiton came one evening and visited an NCSU engineering entrepreneurship class I was enrolled in to give us some insight into the venture-building process from his perspective. He told us that he found it helpful to write down his ideas. It sounds pretty straightforward, but a lot of people including me never do it because we don’t think we have that many good ideas.

When I finally started following his advice, it was a bit like trying to catch seeds being carried away by the wind. Ideas can be overwhelming in large numbers. That’s why it’s better to store them away in a cool, dry place until they’re ready to be planted. They may seem impractical at first, but they could lead to something tangible later.

I try to use the spaghetti method where I throw a bunch of ideas against the wall to see what sticks. As I learned at a friend’s ranger cabin in Yosemite National Park, most of the under-cooked spaghetti falls off the wall, but the cooked noodles stick for a while thanks to gluten. Every piece of spaghetti will fall off the wall after enough time, so a spaghetti thrower can’t wait forever. There comes a point when a judgment call must be made, when the noodle has been there long enough and some of the fallen pieces might even be salvageable for a second chance.

For several years now, I’ve been collecting a list of business venture ideas and their industry categories in a basic spreadsheet, but the time came for something more visually appealing. Spreadsheets are good for personal organization but not for presentation, so I found a tool called RawGraphs to graph the spaghetti data.

The result is the circle packing chart shown above. Boring? Perhaps. I would’ve added more granular information if the app were more powerful, but developers can only do so much with a tiny donations-based budget. Maybe they can consider a premium version with new options in the future: adjustable font sizes for the labels, text wrapping properties for longer text strings, and connector lines to entries lower on the hierarchy.

It would be neat to make a molecular organizational diagram or an atomic map to show relationships between ideas and categories generated by an entire team. One can imagine the possibilities of using interconnected molecular graphs for more detailed outlines, such as the tasks a farmer needs to follow in preparation for spring planting, or all the things I have to do to make a viable web platform for farmers, professionals, and restaurants seeking cleaner food.

Think of all the team meetings that might be more interesting with good visuals. People could compare thoughts and see where they have overlap. Maybe you already do it? Let me know what you use. A few of our seeds could be planted side-by-side.