hey today I'd like to demonstrate how you can use x-colidra for organizing your ideas into a coherent plan. There are many opportunities for taking obsidian excolidra further. I have received many suggestions on GitHub, Discord, YouTube, and Twitter, and I also still have many unmet needs that I'd like to cover with the plugin, and I want to organize these ideas into a roadmap. If you stick around until the end, you will see my roadmap for the plugin. So let's start with a definition. A mind map is a visual representation of ideas. It represents the relationship between items on the map. Some mind maps are free-flowing and unstructured, like the video I published a couple of weeks ago for my brainstorming and planning. Today I'm going to use this more structured approach. I have started with brainstorming ideas and adding some of the outstanding requests from GitHub. Once the list is close to complete, I will organize the ideas into a plan. My template has two axes: the horizontal axis shows time, the vertical axis reality, or to some extent also

difficulty. The bottom left corner is today's reality. This is what I am working on right now. Ideas that are less clear in my mind or seem more difficult will end up in the top right corner. Spoiler alert: by the end of my demonstration, I will slightly reorganize this chart, getting rid of the arcs and dividing the diagram into a three-by-three matrix. Visual planning has some significant benefits. I'd like to highlight three of them today. They are: 1. generating ideas, 2. achieving clarity by linking and grouping, and 3. facilitating better communication of my plan or ideas to others. Let's look at these three in just a little more detail. So, the first benefit is improved generation of ideas. For the Obsidian Xcolidro plugin roadmap, I started the process by reviewing my issue log. As I am placing items on the map, I also build on these ideas, adding additional opportunities to the plan. I am sure that after publishing this video, I will be returning to this roadmap regularly to add additional items as they occur to me. The second benefit is

achieving clarity by grouping and linking ideas. You will develop a stronger grip on each idea when building the road map. I grouped and linked ideas based on the type of development required, that is, the development of the core ex-collateral product or the obsidian plug-in, the difficulty and timing. Then, I think it is realistic to work on each idea, and finally, the dependencies between ideas, which are depicted with arrows. Finally, the third benefit is improved communication. Visual plans are easier to communicate and to understand. This is especially important when working with teams on a visual roadmap. People can clearly see the dependencies, timing, task, or target ownership. This will expedite team alignment. As you can see, the initial cloud of ideas is turning into a coherent plan. Originally not thinking about it in depth, I thought I would also see some items in the top left of the diagram, but of course, it makes sense that the final drawing is rather diagonal, with visionary items pushed to the distant future in the top right. The 3x3 matrix is a very powerful visual.

thinking tool. You can use it for many purposes. For risk management, the two axes would be probability and impact. For business strategy, the two axes could be market share and market growth, like in the case of the Boston box approach. For technical product selection, the two axes may be completeness of the product vision and the vendor's ability to execute. You can even use it for mapping whiskies by flavor. In conclusion, you can see that in the immediate future, my focus will be to deploy the new image element into the Obsidian plugin, achieving as full integration with other Obsidian features as possible. Building on the image element, I see an opportunity to develop a solution for Lotex support and potentially Markdown document previews. I'm also aware of some long-time requests such as pencil support, Chinese handwritten fonts, and proper Markdown formatting of text. Unfortunately, these all have dependencies on the core Excolidra product development. This is why they get to the right and to the top on the diagram. In the long run, I'm thinking to create a plug-in like

environment in which people can share their ex-collateral automate solutions in an easy-to-install setup. I'd like to close with an encouragement to integrate visual thinking into your daily workflow. It is very efficient, and Obsidian with Excolidra offers an excellent tool to make that happen. Thank you.

How to Build Visual Roadmaps - A Case Study developing the Obsidian-Excalidraw Roadmap

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