Actionables – anything that can be grammatically performed as an action. E.g., “we should invade the moon” is not an actionable, but “invade the moon” is.
Adherance – sticking to something.
Affordance – the best use of a tool. E.g., the affordance of a hammer is pounding nails. Its secondary affordance is pulling out nails that aren’t pounded all the way in. To understand a tool and use it correctly, you must understand its true affordance. This requires a deep understanding of both the tool and the general nature of the work.
Auto-hoist – synonymous with “always-hoisted” when used on this site. Refers to BrainStormWFO’s GUI, where you can only see the children of a single parent per pane. “Hoisting” in other outliners hides the parents and siblings of an outline entry. This is an imprecise term, because there are no existing descriptions for BrainStormWFO’s GUI style.
Backlog – when you have a bunch of review activities built up that you haven’t done yet.
Batch sorting – sorting a lot of information at once, for greater efficiency, rather than sorting info in bits as it comes in.
BrainStormWFO – a venerable outliner that is the fastest way to create and edit outlines of large volumes of text.
Brainstorming – coming up with a bunch of ideas on a subject.
Capture – the first time you store info in something other than your brain’s memory.
Chronological tapes – the Cyborganize files the contain all your text in chronological order, divided into several types of text.
Critical path – the tasks that must be completed to achieve the main objective. focus is on those tasks with the greatest duration or resource cost or failure risk in a particular phase, because these are the tasks that shape the rest of the project.
Cyborganize algorithm or Cyborganize workflow – the Cyborganize process for managing your information. Can be divorced from specific software.
Dead text (re outliners) – text within an outlining program that cannot easily be converted into an outline heading of its own, because it is actually part of a file attachment to an outline entry.
Emacs – ostensibly a text editor, but with the power and extensibility of a full operating system hiding under the hood. Used by techies to control vast arcane powers. Once you learn to isolate the writing functions from the supergeek tools, it is an extremely powerful way to manage personal information. Been around since computers. Open source.
Energy – your biological capacity for alert, self-directed, vigorous action. Lack of energy would be fatigue and sleep.
Execution Loop – the Cyborganize workflow cycle that manages your tasks.
Execution sequencing – the order of tasks that must be followed to achieve your goal.
Focus – concentration on the task or subject at hand, without distraction by irrelevant considerations, worries, emotions, or stress.
Frictionless – the workflow avoids stressful sticking points, presenting a smooth experience across various challenging situations.
GTD – “Getting Things Done,” a movement, productivity method, and book by David Allen.
Hierarchical facility (of BrainStormWFO) – refers to the program’s ability to rapidly create and restructure outline hierarchy.
Human mental mechanics – the way that human minds work (or fail to work) when they process info and make decisions.
Inbox staging – leaving info to be sorted in an inbox area, until enough builds up, or something urgent comes in, that triggers a batch sort.
Inductive – building conclusions on the basis of evidence. In Cyborganize, we use this word as an analogy for a similar process: building an overall knowledge structure gradually by rearranging existing disorganized knowledge bits. This is in distinction to deduction, in which we begin with logical principles and then work our way down to the actual evidence. The analogous approach to deduction in info management would be attempting to create a hierarchical knowledge structure first, then fitting your evidence into it. In info management, the deductive approach usually fails unless one already has a masterful intuitive grasp of the subject. Therefore, the inductive approach that Cyborganize enables is a major innovation.
Info fragmentation – when information is scattered in multiple locations with no clear way to see the connections or the big picture.
Info processing system – the workflow and tools you use to capture, store and manipulate your information.
Information overload – when the mind is overwhelmed with too much information. Can refer to trying to think about too many things simultaneously, or the longer-term problem of simply having too much to keep in memory, or too much to process effectively with one’s info workflow, etc. Information overflow can occur at any phase of one’s info management workflow, when queued info overflows the channel size.
Intelligence augmentation – increasing human intelligence through digital or biological means.
Knowledge management – storing, organizing, and retrieving your accumulated information and analysis.
L-mode or left brain – the rational, logical, sequential, linguistic side of the brain. Can be directly controlled, but has a low throughput (limited to one idea at a time, in sequence). Always talking in the foreground.
Linguistic facility (of BrainStormWFO) – refers to the program’s ability to perform fine-grain language and meaning analysis fast enough not to obnoxiously impede thought.
Long-term memory – the mental faculty of remembering over longer time periods. Related to distinct biochemical processes than short-term memory.
Longform – text snippets are standalone bits of text. Longform text is a connected series of paragraphs that would lose informational content if it were chopped up and blended into a greater sea of information. Any essay you write is longform content.
Longform Loop – the Cyborganize workflow cycle that manages your longform text.
Lossless – no information is ever lost from the system.
Mental dissonance – unresolved internal mental contradiction. E.g., a white man who thinks he is black will experience dissonance whenever looking in a mirror, or when people make fun of him. A broken info management system leads to failure to learn and synthesize feedback, resulting in mental dissonance.
Mental fragmentation – a feeling that one has too many pieces and no grasp of the whole, leaving one’s mind unproductively scrambling around suboptimizing problems with no clear view of big picture strategic needs. This occurs when info input exceeds info synthesis capacity.
Mind-machine interface – cybernetic brain augmentation
Mindmap – a visual outline of ideas
Namesakes – when multiple entries in BrainStormWFO are identical, they are automatically linked as namesakes. When one is edited, the others are edited. They share the same children but not the same parents.
One, two and three-pane outliners – see here for a discussion of the differences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner#Layout
Org-Mode – a “major mode” of Emacs, meaning it modifies Emacs’ default behavior. This is the most feature-rich personal organizer, outliner and writing tool in existence. It is undergoing constant development and improvement at a very rapid pace. Development began with creator Carsten Dominic in 2003.
Outliner – a program that helps you make outlines.
Overhead – this is an analogy from the world of business, where “overhead” refers to non-productive, non-flexible administrative costs. Here, we mean the “administrative cost” of maintaining a productivity system in a healthy state so that one can use it to process info. This does not refer to the initial cost of learning the system. In GTD, the main overhead is the review sessions. Cyborganize is low-overhead, because almost all organization is deferrable and directly tied to productive activity.
Pain point – a majorly inconvenient symptom or problem that stands out to you and causes stress or emotional duress.
Paradigm shift or epiphany – when your mind suddenly alters a large portion of your knowledge map in a significant way, throwing many related pieces into new arrangements. Very difficult for clunky knowledge management tools to keep up with, if you get these often. A key element of human learning.
Pivot – to change directions radically, like a basketball player pivoting on one foot. Comes from the startup world, where it means to change a company’s basic business model in response to feedback. Individuals need to take similar actions at strategic life points and often within specific projects. Most task management systems assume a fairly linear life direction, so a pivot will throw them into chaos. Cyborganize’s Execution Loop is flexible enough to handle pivots.
Procedural algorithms – intelligent methods of doing things, distilled to checklists or principles.
R-mode or right brain – the creative, disorganized, intuitive mind functions. Has a very high throughput, but cannot be directly controlled. Always working in the background.
Refactor Your Wetware – a book describing how the mind works as applied to programming (although this can be generalized). Written by Andy Hunt.
Resistance – when your mind fights whatever you’re trying to do.
Reviewing – going back over your info management system to reorganize old material. GTD requires many review sessions at periodic intervals during which an extensive of steps must be completed , or it becomes non-functional.
Scratch file – this is a file created for a single-topic focused work session.
Scratch file loop – the Cyborganize loop that manages scratch file sessions.
Singularity – the point past which the future ceases to be theoretically predictable due to the impossibility of anticipating the actions of intelligences that vastly exceed human intelligence.
Snippet Loop – the Cyborganize workflow cycle that manages all your text by storing them in chronological tapes and then sorting them into massive outlines.
Spaced repetition – the human memory forgets over time, exponentially approaching zero. However, spaced repetitions at exponentially spaced intervals can prevent memory loss. This insight was the origin of “spaced repetition” software, which manages the process of “reminding” the brain of memorized material at scheduled intervals.
SuperMemo – An extremely advanced spaced repetition memorization program with additional advanced features, created by Piotr Wozniak.
Synthesize – to combine multiple pieces of information into a new entity.
T1 – Tier 1 content, the highest level of the Longform Loop. It is interlinked, complete, canonical, longer content. Examples include wikis, books, long presentations, college courses, etc.
T2 – Tier 2 content, the middle level fo the Longform Loop. It is focused, polished essays covering a single topic. Examples include blog posts, newspaper articles, etc.
T3 – Tier 3 content, the lowest level of the Longform Loop. It is unfocused rambles, scratch files, notes, etc. This is the highest volume tier – you will have perhaps 10x more T3 posts than T2 posts.
TextPad – an alternative text editor to Emacs Org-mode for those who find Emacs too challenging.
TiddlyWiki – a wiki with unique properties that render it more usable for T1 content than traditional wikis.
WordPress – the world’s most popular server-hosted blogging software platform. It is free, and used by millions of non-technical users, and has a vast array of plugins, themes and addons.
Workflow – the process you follow when moving your info from encounter, to capture, to storage, to manipulation, and finally archival/deletion. Also, the process by which you manage info to get things done.
Working memory – the stuff you’ve got in your head right now, available for immediate manipulation. The amount of stuff you can simultaneously think about.