Topics and pages

Your thinking is arranged in topics and pages.

• A page is one thing Cranes has understood, titled so that you, a teammate, or a teammate’s AI can tell at a glance what it’s about.
• A topic is a set of related pages. Every page sits in one topic, and each topic has a title, a short summary of what it covers, and its pages in order.

Today lists them all.

Cranes arranges, you adjust

You never file anything. Cranes places each new page in the topic it fits best and, from time to time, reorganizes the topics as your thinking grows. You can then:

• rename a topic or a page,
• move a page to another topic,
• pin a topic or page to put it first,
• archive what you don’t want in your thinking.

Your choices win. Later reorganizing keeps a topic you named, with its name, and leaves a page where you put it. See Pin, rename, and move.

When Cranes reorganizes, it tells you under Needs a look: what changed, in a line each, with a way to undo it.

You can’t create, split, merge, or delete topics yourself. Topics come from the pages in them, so they follow what you’ve actually been thinking about.

New pages

A page that doesn’t fit any topic yet waits under New pages. It finds a home the next time Cranes reorganizes. Once your thinking has topics, that happens at most once a week, and only when three or more pages are waiting or a topic has grown past twelve pages.

You can’t move a page into New pages, but you can move one out of it at any time.

Reorganizing

Cranes keeps what already works, and small changes are the only ones it makes on its own:

• placing pages from New pages in a topic,
• starting a new topic for pages that need one,
• updating what a topic says it covers,
• moving a few pages, at most one in ten of those already in topics, never one you placed yourself.

Bigger changes ask first: renaming a topic, merging one into another, splitting one, retiring one, or moving more pages than that. Cranes lists them under Needs a look as a suggestion (“Merge Pricing into Deals”, “Rename Hiring to Hiring bar”). Nothing changes until you choose Apply. Choose Not now and Cranes won’t suggest reorganizing again for two weeks. If your topics change so much in the meantime that the suggestion no longer fits, Cranes tells you and sets it aside.

Either way, Needs a look says what changed (“Placed 3 new pages in Code review”, “New topic: Incidents”). Choose Undo to put the topics back as they were, or Dismiss once you’ve seen it. Only the latest reorganizing can be undone.

If you open a topic that was merged away, Cranes tells you where it went (“Pricing is now part of Deals”), and anything you pinned or chose about it carries over.

As Cranes learns, pages change too: two pages may become one, one may split in two, a page may be retired, or a page’s title may change. Those show under Needs a look as well, linked to where each page is now.

Finding your way in long thinking

Once your thinking is long, over about forty pages, the contents list every topic but show the pages only of the topic you’re in. Open a topic to see all its pages.

On a phone, the first screen lists your topics, and a topic opens to its pages.