Moving Groups of Thoughts

Sometimes you need to be able to move groups of thoughts to another branch of the brain. For example, if you have been accumulating news articles and end of with too many to conveniently view in one screen, then breaking the articles into groups by, say, year may be the right approach. So how do you move a bunch of articles at once? This how-to gives one approach.

Goal

Let's assume you have a parent thought called "News" with a lot of children containing articles. It looks something like this:

News

|

|

(30 or 40 articles)

and you want it to look like this:

News

/|\

/ | \

2006 2007 2008

(with the articles linked as children to their respective years)

Steps:

1. Click on "News" so it has focus.
2. Right click, then add three thoughts as children named, "2006", 2007" and "2007."
3. Select all the 2006 articles (do this by Ctrl-clicking each article). This will add each article to the Selection window on the left.
4. When done selecting, click on the 2006 thought so it gains focus.
5. Right-click on any one of the thoughts in the Selection window, then click on "Link Selected Thoughts" and finally "As children of 2006". All the selected thought will be linked to 2006 now, as well as to News.
6. Now we will un-link the articles from News. Click on News so it gains focus.
7. Again, right-click on any one of the thoughts in the Selection window, then click on "Unlink Selected Thoughts from News." All the links to News will be broken, leaving the articles linked only to their year.
8. Close the selection window by clicking on the "X" in its menu bar.
9. Repeat steps 3-7 for 2007 and 2008.

Other Uses

Mass linking can be useful for linking a group of thoughts to an additional parent. The above approach can be followed, omitting step 7 where we unlinked the thoughts from their old parent.

== Ollie