Cyborganize is not supposed to further enable your OCD lifestyle. It’s supposed to end it.
There are four core design principles:
- Lightweight – It cannot add to my overhead, ever.
- Frictionless – I should never be stuck. No writer’s block. No uncertainty about the best next action.
- Lossless – Nothing important should be forgotten or hard to find.
- Optimal – It should inexorably drive me to optimal execution and thinking.
There’s no need to violate any of these principles when you transition from your old system to Cyborganize.
Phase 1 – the Task Snippet Loop
Cyborganize is as easy as pie once you learn it, but don’t try to start by doing everything.
Start with the tasks.
Your continually evolving hierarchy of actionables is the MOST IMPORTANT info stream in your life.
OBVIOUSLY you want to start there.
BrainStormWFO’s linguistic and hierarchical facility makes it the ONLY app suitable for managing your core task stream.
So set up a simple task capture chronological tape, and occasionally batch sort the new entries into your actionables.brn file.
Here’s the hierarchy for your tasks outline:
Inbox
1 By time
2 Habit instillation
3. By priority
4. By project
5. Reference
M missorted
Sort your tasks in descending order. Ergo, time critical goes into 1, habits into 2, priority stuff into 3, all else into 4, and frequent reference info like passwords into 5.
“1 By time” is further subdivided into the following headings:
Inbox
1. A day
2. A week
3. Waiting on not my execution
4. A month
5. A year
M missorted
Right now I mostly cycle between “1. Day” and “2. Week”.
Phase 2 – the Notes Snippet Loop
ONLY when you’ve got your actionable snippets loop working, should you go on to the next step.
That would be your “notes” chronological tape. It will capture ALL your written thoughts.
Dump every scrap of info you’ve created by hand here. Datestamp it liberally. If you have non-text multimedia like spreadsheets or graphics, note the file name and contents, since you can’t include it directly.
This is your LOSSLESS and CHRONOLOGICAL record of all your thoughts.
As with the actionables silo, you will occasionally batch sort this into a notes.brn file.
However, you won’t need to do this very often, because you’ll also have your longform processing loop.
In fact, you can go months or years without sorting it.
Phase 3 – The Longform Processing Loop
All this slicing, dicing, and sorting is well and good, but it makes it difficult to view our contiguous complex thought trains, which may contain several types of information and cross multiple subject boundaries.
So, we’ll use the Longform Processing Loop to handle this.
The Longform Loop starts with simple scratch text files. They’ll accept any info… tasks, copy-pasted research, your own thoughts, whatever.
Fire up a scratch file when you start working on something that needs its own space for a while. I go through a few of these per day.
When a scratch file is done, if it’s a valuable interconnected meditation, post it for future reference to your T3 blog. This is your random scrapbook of brain dumps. Tag it with all the categories that apply to that entry. Bam, you’ve got a datestamped and categorized record of that long thought.
Your T3 blog will be significantly more accessible and useful than your notes chron tape. Thoughts will be longer and fully developed. You’ll be able to quickly reconstruct your thoughts at a particular time. The notes chron tape, by contrast, is quite fragmentary and often terse or mysterious.
When you’ve really got a polished and focused longform thought, post it to your T2 blog.
When you’re ready to write a comprehensive review of a topic from multiple angles, write it on your T1 wiki.
And keep in mind, at every stage, you also dump new longform notes and actionables back into the snippet loops for fine processing. So long thoughts are copied into two places – your snippets loop AND your longform loop.
Congratulations – You Now Have an Integrated Mind
Your tasks will always be properly captured, deferred and prioritized.
Your thoughts will gradually crystallize into settled knowledge.
New insights generated by the process will continually surprise and intrigue you.
Best of all, the longform and snippet processing loops will reinforce each other.
R-mode complements L-mode. Rigorous logical arrangement and expansion complements creative disordered sprawl.
That means no anxiety when in creative mode, and no myopia when in logical mode. And NO spending massive amounts of time sorting as your only method of getting a handle on the big picture.
Learn the Rest Later
When ready you can set up your “quotes” silo, for your copy pasted and research materials. And then look at tracking your time in a journal, improving your habit management, and myriad other details.
But the essential parts are there and operational.
No amount of backlog will ever choke it.
In fact, over a lifetime of use it will only increase in value as an info asset.
Can you say that about any other GTD-like system or application workflow? NO.
If you don’t have time to organize, just alternate between scratch files, actionable generation, freeform execution/writing bursts, and a teeny bit of actionable sorting in BrainStormWFO.
You’ll never run dry. And that’s the point.