One of the largest improvements I have made to my personal development workflow is keeping a commonplace book of all the things I have been tinkering with, for "fun" and for work. The process has worked best since I started keeping it in a TiddlyWiki, a nice digital format. This may be worth a post at another time, though at least one post has already been made.

I still use FreeMind mind maps when doing brainstorming or freewheeling research when things are very much in flux. I tend to love mind maps during this phase, but don't find them as attractive a tool for longer term knowledge management. This usually leads me to the point where I want to import my notes into TiddlyWiki. Now, it is entirely possible to simply export an image or HTML page from FreeMind and add the file to TiddlyWiki. It is also possible to attach the raw .mm file. In some cases, this may even make sense.

Sometimes, however, it would just make more sense to dump it as an outline in wiki text format. To help with this, I have created an XSLT stylesheet (mostly because I've never done real, dedicated work with XSLT) that can be used fairly readily. It is on github at https://github.com/michaeljmcd/mm2tiddlywikitext under an MIT license. One of these days I might package it into a better standalone utility. Maybe not. We'll see.