The Longform Loop lets you manage longer thoughts. By “longer”, I mean anywhere from several paragraphs to several hundred pages.

I classify longer thoughts into three tiers:

Tier 1: Polished, comprehensive and interconnected long bodies of work, like published books or wikis or college courses.

Tier 2: Polished non-comprehensive articles focused on a single topic, such as essays, newspaper stories, college papers, or a good blog post.

Tier 3: Unpolished unfocused stream of consciousness rambles and raw working notes, such as a Livejournal rant or your notes from a professor’s lecture.

The Longform Loop moves your longer thoughts through four major stages:

1. Initial capture in a scratch file in Emacs Org-Mode
2. Posted to your Tier-3 blog
3. Posted to one of your Tier-2 blogs
4. Posted to your Tier-1 Tiddlywiki

Next I’ll describe each of these four stages.

The scratch file stage

Scratch files are reusable files in Emacs Org-Mode. They provide a focused work area.

Any time you begin working on a new topic, open up a new scratch file. Then write a specific, focused prompt at the top.

Number your scratch files to keep track of the chronological order of their creation. For example: scratch.org, scratch1.org, scratch2.org, etc.

Scratch files are where most of your actual writing should occur. Minor edits can be performed in WordPress or TiddlyWiki. For more involved work, it’s better to use Emacs Org-Mode’s superior writing environment.

I typically accumulate 5-40 open scratch files before I begin to lose track of information. Then I batch process them to my T3 blog. This happens between 1-5 times per week.

The processing method is simple:

1. Begin with the first scratch file opened, and go in chronological order.
2. Make sure the scratch file’s title matches its content.
3. If necessary, divide the scratch file into two or more files.
4. Then, copy the text from Emacs to your T3 WordPress.
5. Tag the relevant categories in WordPress, and hit publish.
6. Delete the contents of the scratch file, close it, and move to the next one.

(Note – the Execution Loop and Snippet Loop both add additional scratch file processing steps, which are not covered here.)

At this point, you are done with the scratch file stage.

The T3 blog stage

From the previous section, you can already guess that a T3 blog accumulates lots of entries. You might create 5-10 per day.

These entries are organized in two ways:

1. By category
2. By chronology

Categories are major life areas into which you can group a lot of your T3 entries. Some overlap is fine, but don’t create subtopics. For example, “vegetables” and “fruit” are two acceptable categories, but “vegetables” and “broccoli” are not. I currently have 25 categories in my T3.

Since scratch files are batch processed, your WordPress post dates will be slightly off. However the sequence should be correct, which is more important.

In addition to reading by sequence or category, you can also use a powerful WordPress search plugin to find info.

Your T3 blog is a locally hosted WordPress installation. It needs to be locally hosted for speed and 100% availability. It is therefore completely private. I explain how to set one up on another page.

Benefits of the T3 blog

The T3 blog is a handy record of your work, allowing you to reconstruct your actions from incomplete documentation. It’s a raw reference enabling you to review your mental state on a specific topic at certain time. Longform text thoughts are the ultimate “interconnected database,” because they are filled with rich nuance and meaning that cannot be fully represented in graphical mindmaps or relational databases.

Together, the scratch file and the T3 blog encourage you to write more. They let you write as many first drafts as you like without incurring organizational costs. Practice and repetition make you a better writer. Capturing your ideas makes you a better thinker and a more organized person.

Lastly, your T3 blog is a reservoir of raw writing material from which you can draw when writing your polished T2 posts.

The T2 blog stage

Your T3 blog is one blog that spans all topics in your life.

In the T2 stage, your life is split into several different blogs with different themes. These can be public or private, depending on your preference.

Most of your T2 blogs will cover several related categories. However, if you are writing a book about a topic, then it probably deserves its own T2 blog. Also, you should have one main T2 blog for miscellaneous topics that don’t fit elsewhere.

There is no optimal length for a T2 blog post. The important thing is to cover one specific topic per post.

Adding more stages for better writing

A T2 blog containing mostly first drafts is closer to a T3 blog in quality. A T2 blog containing polished interlinked posts is more like a T1 wiki in quality. I call these T2.5 and T1.5 blogs, respectively.

To achieve higher-quality writing, you can increase the number of stages a piece must go through before being published. For example, here are my current Longform Loop stages for my Cyborganize writing:

T3: My T3 blog has a category called “Cyborganize”
T2.5: I have a general T2 blog that is private and a bit rougher. It has a category for Cyborganize.
T2: This site is my T2 blog for Cyborganize.
T1.5: When this site becomes comprehensive and interlinked, it will be a T1.5 blog.
T1: I have a Cyborganize category in my T1 TiddlyWiki file, where I am drafting my Cyborganize book. Right now it only has a few articles.

All these writing stages may seem like a lot of work. But actually, it’s much harder to force your writing to happen, rather to let it organize and improve itself naturally over time.

The T1 stage

The T1 stage is for polished, comprehensive, long works.

The preferred environment for creating T1 content is the Wiki, because it allows you to create without worrying about sequence and organization. This significantly decreases the difficulty of writing T1 content, which is already very hard because of the quality required.

The final T1 output doesn’t have to be a wiki. It might be a book, a college course, a lecture series, or a consulting practice.

Writing a T1 wiki doesn’t happen overnight. But as content gradually builds up in the lower tiers and moves up, it becomes easier.

I can give you a few tips for writing a good wiki. Write specific topic headings and stay within them. Pay careful attention to tagging and naming conventions. Build and maintain your indexes. Use the search engine to ensure you don’t have orphaned articles.

If it proves difficult and you’re dissatisfied with the quality of your writing, that’s a sign you should move down to a lower tier, to reformulate and test your content.

A natural writing system

As you’ve seen, the Longform Loop is more than a knowledge management system. It automates the writing process, breaking it down into a series of small quality improvements.

It is very relaxing to know that your knowledge is progressing to a more polished and refined state daily. Using the Longform Loop, I am able to tackle hugely ambitious writing projects with aplomb.

When I remember how I used to attack my writing projects, I shudder. I always wound up with multiple conflicting drafts of uneven quality, a disorganized mess that stressed me out and made me want to give up.

I hope that the Longform Loop will help you focus and crystallize your ideas, and express them clearly and beautifully.