FreeMind is a free MindMapping tool designed to help organise your thoughts and ideas. Such a simple concept can really change the way you organise your life and/or work.

Tradtionally mindmaps are drawn on paper using colour and pictures to stimulate thoughts, ideas and memories. MindMaps take on the form of spider diagrams so one thought can lead on to more ideas and branches of thoughts which you can then evolve.

Using a software method, although not pictorially as good as a paper based MindMap, allows you to modify and rearrange your thoughts. You can use a range of colour, shapes and line styles.

FreeMind incorporates these methods and also supports the use of pictures and icons. You can use the ones built in to the software, which seem to be uniform across various MindMapping software, or you can use your own.

Freemind comes with many different icons to represent ideas in a mind mapped project. For example a light bulb could represent an idea, a tick and a cross could represent good or bad and there are numeric icons to represent priorities.

Freemind is a Java program so can run on any platform which has a Java runtime. So Windows, Linux and Mac OS X users will normally be fine to download an install Freemind.