Unpack Your Mind

The flow of information these days is seemingly endless. People you meet. Books you want to read. Concepts you believe will help you succeed. Skills you’re learning. Projects you’re working on. Where do you keep all this stuff?

There are things you won’t forget, and things you don’t care to remember, but what about everything else?

Lots of apps exist which allow you to jot down free-form notes. But what about the information where the relationships between information are critically important to you?

Who is friends with whom? Where does this person work? Who else do I know that works there? Who used to work there? What skills do they have that could help me with this project? Who else has those skills?

MindModel is Windows® desktop software that empowers you to unpack your mind.

Ready-to-use relational database, without programming

For a non-programmer, creating a database with one table (such as customers, organizations, events) is pretty easy. You could use Microsoft Access®, or any similar software package.

Even a multi-table database isn’t that difficult. Create a table for each entity. Add columns to each table for the info you need to record.

When it’s time to relate one table to another (eg connect the organizations table with the people table), it gets trickier. Yes, anyone can learn to do it. But it takes quite a while to learn and it’s very easy to make a mess.

MindModel is ready-to-use relational database software. The categories and relationships between categories have already been created for you.

All you need to do is enter and retrieve the data.

Tech Platform

MindModel is desktop software that works with Microsoft Windows® 10. We do not currently have a version for Web, iOS or Android.

Everyone is welcome, but MindModel is not for everyone

When we say “everyone is welcome” we mean that we invite everyone with access to a Windows PC and an Internet connection to try out our free, fully-functional demo for 30 days.

If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email, and we’ll do our best to help you.

When we say “not for everyone” we mean, frankly, that some people like MindModel and some people don’t.

We enthusiastically accept user feedback and have done so for a long time. However, we’ve noticed that feedback falls into two categories:

1. Suggestions for how to improve MindModel.

2. Indications that the person making the suggestion would probably do better with different software. Or maybe the software they need has not yet been invented.

The fundamental premise of MindModel is that much of what people learn and want to remember is focused around a shared set of topics.

This shared set of topics implies a shared set of relationships.

For example, people are friends with people. People learn concepts. People have skills, or want to learn skills or teach skills.

Accepting these assumptions allows someone who likes MindModel to get right to work and get things done. These people are often amazed by MindModel’s power and usefulness.

Some of that power is not even contained in the software itself. It’s found in the way that MindModel gently helps you see things differently, remember more easily and make connections you might otherwise have missed.

Others have kind of a “How dare you?” response to our chosen set of topics and relationships between topics. So much work has been done, for so many years, to standardize knowledge management. Who are we to reinvent this wheel?

Our answer to that is that MindModel doesn’t take anything away from you. If you prefer a more open-source, formalized approach and you have the tools to manage your data with those ontologies, that’s the way for you to go.

However, we are not aware of easy-to-use, GUI-based software that allows you to enter and retrieve data from the start, without programming skills, using open-source ontologies.

While we admit to feeling some hesitation bringing our “opinionated framework” to the world, we’ve also been surprised, when asking users about this issue, that many don’t care. They want to store and recall important information, without learning how to program and without learning complex, abstract systems.

If you think MindModel might work for you, please try our fully-functional, free demo and let us know!