How it Works
(If you'd prefer to see these features demonstrated in a video, you can find one at the bottom of the page.)
Doubleclick the Idea Cruncher icon on the desktop, or choose the Idea Cruncher shortcut from the start menu, and you should see a window with three main sections as shown here:
Entering Ideas
In the top left corner of the window, you will find an editing box marked "New Idea" and just below it, a tree control with a single item called "Title". Click on the "New Idea" box and type something.
When you hit enter, you will see your typing move into the tree below, under the "Title" item.
The New Idea box is empty again, waiting for your next idea. If you continue to type and hit enter, you will get a simple list under "Title."
Suppose you want to add another level of detail underneath one of the ideas you just entered. Just click on that idea, and it will light up the same way the "Title" idea was lit up to begin with. This indicates that new ideas will be inserted under this idea. Anything you type in the "New Idea" box will show up under this idea.
You can continue adding ideas and new levels of detail until you are satisfied.
Finally, change the "Title" idea to something meaningful. Select the Title idea then click on the text to rename it, the same way you would rename a file. Press enter when you're done. You can change the text on any idea this way.
The notes window to the right of the tree holds notes for the currently selected idea. As you click on different ideas, the notes window changes to show what you've written about each idea you click. You might put rough drafts of text, website addresses to visit, details about an idea, or anything else that you might want to attach to an idea:
The Zoom Command
You can see that it doesn't take a whole lot of brainstorming before the outline starts looking a little busy. As the tree fills up, the visual complexity can start weighing your creative energy down. We can't have that. To deal with the clutter, Idea Cruncher has a "Zoom" command. What the Zoom command does is temporarily hide everything in the tree except what you're working on at the moment. It works like a set of blinders that you can use to focus in on a section of your outline and add as much additional detail as you want without becoming overwhelmed.
To use the Zoom command, just right-click any idea in the tree and choose "Zoom In" from the pop-up menu.
As soon as you select Zoom In, everything except your selected idea and its children gets temporarily hidden. You can continue adding detail under any visible idea in the tree as before.
You will always know that you are in this zoomed mode because you will see a "Show All" button in the top right corner of the tree window.
When you click the "Show All" button, the tree is shown in its entirety again.
Separating Projects from their Actions and Marking them as Completed
When you're working on a big project (or, more realistically, a collection of diverse smaller projects), one of the challenges is trying to get the planning done upfront. But upfront planning pays off. Breaking big projects down into smaller pieces and knocking off those sub-projects one at a time can be very psychologically empowering. We all like to feel a sense of momentum and control, especially when the work is long and the goal is far off. That's why outliners like Idea Cruncher store information in a hierarchy—to help us keep track of the sub-projects that make up the big-picture goal(s) that we're trying to accomplish.
Eventually, the planning of sub-projects hits the level of individual actions: the specific, small tasks that need to get done to reach some larger objective. As a result, Idea Cruncher has a way to flag certain ideas in the outline as actions. Instead of blue spheres, actions are represented by orange arrows. Changing an idea in the tree into an action is just a matter of right-clicking it and choosing "Action" from the pop-up menu. In addition to changing the visual representation, identifying an action adds it to an action list that you can display at the bottom of the Idea Cruncher window. To see this action list, choose View > Action List.
The actions appear in the action list in the same order they appear in the tree. To quickly find the location of an action in the tree, just double-click it in the action list. Idea Cruncher will bring the action into view in the tree so that you can see where it came from. Finally, the action list takes the current Zoom level into account; if you have zoomed to a smaller section of the tree (as described above), only the actions in that section of the tree will be shown in the action list.
Enjoy Checking Things Off
Keeping track of what you have finished and what you still have to do is a time-honoured part of project management. Marking something as finished usually involves drawing a satisfying line through the finished items. You can mark any idea or action as finished by right-clicking it and choosing "Completed" from the pop-up menu.
Video
Here's a short video that demonstrates the Idea Cruncher features that we just discussed.
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