Cyborganize has the power to transform your life over time.

To achieve this effect, you must be using all three loops – Execution, Snippet and Longform.

• The Execution Loop reveals your unconscious priorities, and continuously executes the most important tasks.
• The Snippet Loop builds a complete map of your reality.
• The Longform Loop coalesces your thoughts into more polished and refined forms.

The result is that you become more like your true self.

The Execution Loop reveals your true priorities

The Execution Loop forces you to prioritize your tasks by relative priority, rather than assigning numerical rankings for absolute importance.

This is important because it is impossible to consistently apply absolute priority rankings across all the tasks in your life. However, it’s quite easy to determine whether task A is more important than task B.

Human beings have cognitive biases that create inconsistent preference hierarchies. These inconsistencies can be resolved by limiting preference rankings to A/B choices. It’s when we consider many options that our preferences become inconsistent.

Accurate self-knowledge is notoriously difficult to achieve. Human beings are able self-deceivers. Even beyond the problem of cognitive biases, you are likely to give false priority ratings to certain items, if you are dealing in absolute numbers.

In short, you do not know what’s really important to you until you go through a process of A/B ranking. The results of the process will surprise you, but these are your true priorities. The Execution Loop prevents cognitive biases and self-deception from interfering with the pursuit of your true goals.

Continuous generation of new actionables

Whenever you execute a task, you think of many other related tasks you might accomplish next. The Execution Loop encourages you to capture these for later prioritization and execution. This creates a continuous rain of new actionables on your task outline.

Thus there’s little need to carefully sort old data in your outline. If something’s important, it will repeatedly pop up in your brain and be captured into the system.

Old data will accumulate in the lower outline levels of your actuionables outline. When you finally go back and look at them, you’ll be able to delete much of it as no longer relevant. But you will also discover some hidden gems that have now become important.

Thus the Execution Loop is both:

• lossless – it never forgets tasks unless you deliberately delete them, and
• low overhead – you never need to reorganize lower levels unless the mood strikes you.

Build a mindmap of your reality

The Snippet Loop takes your notes and processes them into an outline hierarchy – a mindmap of all your thoughts.

This allows you to develop a map of your identity and the world around you. It provides exception mental clarity.

Although this is a tremendous undertaking, BrainStormWFO sorting procedures allow you to do it automatically.

You can pick up or leave off on this job at any time, thanks to batch sorting and inbox staging. It is not a critical step in your execution process. However, it is an excellent method of self-discovery or mental clarification.

Typically, you will not often work on this grand mental outline. You’ll only do it when you really need to organize your thoughts on the entirety of your life. More often, you will outline your thoughts on specific topics within the Scratch Loop. However, it’s extremely valuable to do this at least once, and it’s a good idea to update your mental mindmap at least once a year.

Even when you aren’t constantly updating it, this mindmap serves as an anxiety backstop. You know that if necessary you can put in the hours to completely integrate all your ideas into a comprehensive mental map. After reminding yourself of this option, you’ll usually let procrastination take over, and go do something else instead (like your next high-priority task). In this case, we’re using one vice to beat another – anxiety versus procrastination.

Why you need to write (a lot) more

The Longform Loop provides continuous refinement of your longer thoughts.

Writing is a curious activity with several unique properties:

1. The more you do it, the better you get at it
2. As you repeat ideas, you condense and refine them
3. Expressing ideas helps you move on to subsequent ideas
4. Occasionally you will have paradigm shifts that render your old thinking obsolete, and writing accelerates this

No other organizational system accounts for the above four properties of writing. They mostly treat writing as a “one-and-done” activity – you write the draft, and that’s it. Some of them do acknowledge that it’s a process of refinement and improvement, so they weld on features to account for second, third, and fourth drafts, etc. But these are all patches. The design doesn’t fundamentally account for the way writing actually works.

The problem is that writing is categorically messy. You can’t always identify one series of drafts resulting in a finished document. Titles and classifications shift and overlap. Ideas that were primary become secondary, and vice versa. Your ideas on a topic may extend back over years.

Most people resolve the problem of storing their miscellaneous writing by not writing unless they have a specific goal in mind. This is a tremendous loss. Look again at the four characteristics of writing. The less you write, the worse you think. That’s why Cyborganize encourages you to write down every significant thought that crosses your mind.

The Longform Loop solves the writing problem by breaking it into three broad classifications – T1, T2 and T3. To review briefly, here’s what they mean:

• T1 – polished, complete, canonical, interlinked, longer bodies of work
• T2 – polished, non-interlinked essays focused on a single topic
• T3 – rambling, non-focused, unpolished writing

Each class has different info management needs. Within each class, there are predictable commonalities:

• Your T3 rambles need lots of cross-categorization. You will talk about multiple subjects within a single essay. It also needs to be high-volume – you can write a lot of rambling each day.
• Your T2 needs to be in its own platform, separate from your T3 chaff. Also, you will often want to create separate platforms for individual T2 topics. This allows you to begin to create the basis for T1 content.
• Your T1 content may be all on one platform, or separated by topic. It needs to be highly revisable and interlinkable. This content will be polished to a very high level of precision. The emphasis is less on managing large volumes, and more on producing comprehensive wholes.

Cyborganize uses WordPress for T3 and T2, and TiddlyWiki for T1. You’ll need at least two WordPress blogs, and at least one TiddlyWiki. These two softwares are uniquely well-adapted to managing your writing.

The net effect of writing more

Content accumulates at a steady pace in all three tiers. You might write 5-10 T3 posts for every T2 post, and 5-10 T2 posts for every T1 page.

The constant writing keeps important ideas fresh in your mind, and creates a steady flow of inspiration. By the time you’re ready to write T1 content, you’ll hardly need to refer to your T2 and T3 stuff, because you’ll know exactly what to say.

It’s just like giving speeches – the more often you give a talk, the better you become at delivering it. Standup comedians continually refine their act in front of an audience. Writing is the same way.

And of course if you do get stuck, you have a huge amount of material already written in the lower tiers that you can easily find and repurpose.

Engaging in this process fundamentally changes the way that you think. People who don’t write are constantly thinking variations of the same thought over and over again. They’re afraid to move forward because they might forget something important they’ve already thought of. This is neurotic and leads to a static mental map, unable to learn.

The Longform Loop allows you to constantly move forward. There’s no fear of losing old ideas. This freedom lets your subconscious take over and do its job, absorbing and reformulating ideas while you sleep, work and play.

And, of course, you also wind up with a large body of polished thoughts on a wide range of subjects. You can refer back to these years later. You can send them to clients. You can use them to write a book.

Everyone respects authors because what they do is so tremendously difficult. But with Cyborganize, it’s trivially easy. The only hard part is choosing a stopping point, since your ideas will always be evolving.

Most importantly, you will develop and clarify and advance your thinking, in a way that would be completely impossible without the Longform Loop. You will feel a tremendously calming sense of personality integration – that all of your ideas fit together, are complete, and make sense.

People who do not use computers can never achieve this wonderful feeling, because the limits of biological memory prevent them from integrating and developing complex ideas over time.

The power of all three Loops combined

The Execution Loop will surface the actions most important to you, and help you get them done. You will be like a airliner on a transcontinental flight – always correcting to be on course.

The Snippet Loop will give you a comprehensive, integrated map of the world and your identity. You will have no trouble seeing the big picture clearly.

The Longform Loop will constantly drive forward your creative right brain, integrating and storing knowledge, and transforming it into polished works suitable for publication or sharing.

You will be an absolute machine. That is the goal. That is Cyborganize.