TextTree

What is a Mandala Chart?

A technique for expanding a single goal using a 3x3 grid of squares. You place your goal at the center, write related themes in the 8 surrounding squares, then take each of those themes and place it at the center of a new 3x3 grid, breaking it down further into concrete actions. The full layout ends up as a 3x3 arrangement of 3x3 grids — 81 squares in total.

It’s well known as the goal-setting sheet Shohei Ohtani worked through in high school, but the technique itself isn’t limited to any one field — it works just as well for study plans, work goals, or brainstorming themes for a project.

Where this works well

• When you want to break one big goal down to the level of concrete actions
• When you want to comprehensively cover everything related to a goal (fixing the count at 8 themes keeps the breakdown neither too coarse nor too fine)
• When you’re planning something with several parallel tracks, like a study plan or a personal development project
• When you want to take ideas from a brainstorm and restructure them afterward

About the sample diagram

The “Mandala Chart” folder in the demo above holds one diagram.

The sample theme is the goal “Ship an app in 3 months.” The center table holds this goal along with the 8 themes that support it: Planning & Requirements, Learning & Skills, Design, Implementation, Testing, UI/UX, Release Prep, and Maintenance.

Of those 8 themes, only “Learning & Skills” has been filled in all the way — its surrounding 8 squares hold concrete actions. The other 7 themes only have their center square filled in, so when you build your own chart, keep adding actions to those the same way as you think of them.

Building a Mandala Chart in ThinkTray

Step 1: Decide on the center goal

Start by deciding on one goal you want to achieve. A Mandala Chart is a technique for “breaking an oversized goal down to a workable size,” so a goal that’s somewhat concrete in scope and timing (like “ship an app in 3 months”) is easier to fill in later than something too abstract, like “grow.”

Step 2: Build the center table

Pick the ”🪟 Table” tool in the toolbar and drag across a blank area to place a 3-row × 3-column table card. Write your goal in the center square, then use the 8 surrounding squares for the elements you need in order to reach it. It helps to think in terms of 8 separate angles on “what needs to be in place for this goal to happen.”

The sample splits it into these 8:

If a square doesn’t have a good answer yet, it’s fine to leave it blank for now rather than forcing something in.

Step 3: Surround the center table with 8 more tables

Place 8 more 3x3 table cards around the center one. Put the matching theme from Step 2 in the center square of each surrounding table. Keeping each theme’s position consistent between the center table and the outer layout — for example, placing the table for a theme that sits in the upper-right of the center grid in the upper-right of the whole layout — makes the correspondence obvious at a glance when you look back at it later.

Step 4: Fill the 8 squares with concrete actions

For each of the 8 outer tables, write concrete actions for achieving that theme into its 8 surrounding squares. In the sample’s “Learning & Skills” table, the breakdown looks like this:

• Block 30 min every morning
• Read 2 articles a week
• Copy small code samples
• Try a library you’re curious about
• Write down what you learned
• Log where you got stuck
• Review learnings monthly
• Pick the next topic

The point of this step is to take an abstract theme (Learning & Skills) and get it concrete enough to become “something to do today.” You don’t need to fill every square at once — adding ideas as they come to you is enough.

Tips

• Start from the center — Don’t try to fill all 81 squares at once. Decide the center goal and the 8 themes first, then dig into each theme in turn.
• Leave empty squares empty — Forcing something into a square you don’t have an idea for tends to water it down. Leave it blank and add to it later when something comes to you.
• Keep theme positions consistent — Matching each theme’s position between the center table and the surrounding layout makes the structure easy to read at a glance across all 9 tables.
• Get down to the action level — The point of the 8 outer squares is to be specific enough that you know what to do just by looking at them (“read 2 technical articles a week” rather than “build technical skills”).
• Don’t rush to finish — It’s fine to fully flesh out one theme first, like the sample does, and fill in the rest gradually over time.

“Mandala Chart” is a registered trademark of Clover Management Institute Co., Ltd. and the Mandala Chart Association in Japan.