Tips on Managing your To-Do List with Idea Cruncher
A to-do list is rarely a simple flat list of items. Tasks often have subtasks, and there are sometimes details (e.g., dimensions, website addresses, etc.) that are critical to accomplishing the task. With Idea Cruncher, tasks can be broken down to any desired level, and each task can have notes associated with it.
Here are a few suggestions for using Idea Cruncher to keep a to-do list:
- Since there is no written product, you would typically hide the draft pane by dragging its top border to the bottom of the window. Doing that makes more room for the tree and notes.
- If you are a fan of David Allen's book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, consider using Idea Cruncher to capture and organize the various lists that the book recommends. Here's one possible arrangement:
- You enter tasks and subtasks into the tree through the usual methods. As you complete tasks, you can move them to a special tree item that you have set up to hold completed tasks, or simply delete them from the tree. Deleting feels good, but you may want to keep the associated information, which is why a special section of the tree might be a better way to move completed tasks out of the way.
- You can use one Idea Cruncher file for your entire to-do list, including work tasks, home tasks, grocery lists, etc. If you have Idea Cruncher on several computers and you have some portable media (e.g., a USB drive), you can carry the to-do list with you and have access to your tasks whenever you are close to one of your computers. Simply make top-level entries in the tree for different areas of your life and add tasks to the appropriate item (e.g., home, work, to-buy, etc.). If you get into the habit of always opening your to-do list when you sit down at the computer, you can just leave it in the background to refer to as you need it. You can also add tasks as they come to you -- getting things down in this way may reduce the number of forgotten ideas and increase your efficiency.
- You are free (of course) to set up the to-do list in any way that makes sense to you. The structure will probably evolve over time. If you have one to-do list for everything you are working on, you might want to make the very first item in the list the "Immediate Priorities," which you want to accomplish in the next day or so. You can copy these priority items from other places in the tree to this special section to make them easier to find.
- At different points in the day, you may want to print sections of the list to carry with you (e.g., groceries) without having to print everything. To print only the currently selected item in the tree and its "child" items, click on the item with the mouse and select "Print Selected Idea" from the File menu. This command can also be found on the menu you get when you right click on an item in the tree.
- As the number of tasks grows, you may want to focus in on a particular section and ignore everything else. You can do this with the “Zoom in” command, available in the View menu. When you zoom in, only the selected idea and its children will be visible in the Tree Control. You can do anything with this “sub-tree” that you would normally do with the entire outline. When you finish with your work on the sub-tree, choose the “Show all” command from the View menu and you will see your entire outline again, complete with any changes you made to the sub-tree while it was zoomed. In a to-do list, especially one spanning multiple projects, you often want to focus on one section to brainstorm or organize the tasks just in that section. The Zoom command is designed exactly for this purpose.
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