The Snippet Loop handles all of your text. It allows you to preserve a chronological record of your thoughts, manage your tasks, and create a mindmap of your entire brain.

If a section of text is long and it’s important to preserve its original sequence, then it also belongs in the Longform Loop. Longform text needs a special method of handling that the Snippet Loop cannot provide.

Here are the stages of the Snippet Loop:

1. Emacs scratch files
2. Copied to Emacs chronological tape files
3. Copied to BrainStormWFO mindmap files

Scratch files are temporary text files focused on a single topic. Chronological tapes are large text files containing all your text. BrainStormWFO files are outlines that rapidly rearrange your text to reflect the structure of your brain.

Some text is important and urgent. You shouldn’t let all the unimportant text bury the critical tidbits. That’s why the the Snippet Loop divides your text into three main categories:

1. Actionables – anything that can be grammatically performed as an action. I also include key reference info here, such as passwords.
2. Notes – anything you wrote yourself.
3. Quotes – anything you copied from elsewhere.

We have seperate chronological tapes and BrainStormWFO files for each of these categories.

Typically you will have 10x more quoted material than notes. We don’t want to let important quotes get buried, either. So we divide the quotes category into subcategories:

1. Epic quotes – short, life-changing quotes
2. Elite quotes – really good quotes
3. Quotes – normal quotes
4. Reference – long copied texts of relatively low importance

In the third stage of the Snippet Loop, we move text from the Emacs chronological tapes to BrainStormWFO files for mindmapping. So, for example:

1. actionables.org -> actionables.brn
2. notes.org -> notes.brn
3. epic-quotes.org -> epic-quotes.brn
4. etc.

A .brn file is a BrainStormWFO file. A .org file is an Emacs Org-Mode file.

Once text has been batch sorted to BrainStormWFO, it can be dynamically rearranged to suit your current objective.

Now you have an overview of the Snippet Loop. Next I will describe each of the three stages in detail.

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, you should 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 work occurs. You can use Org-Mode to create an outline to organize your work session. You can clock time spent on each task to track your billable hours.

I typically accumulate 5-40 open scratch files before I begin to lose track of information. Then I batch process them to my chronological tapes. 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. Copy the entire scratch file to notes.org (assuming you wrote most of it yourself)
5. Delete everything that isn’t actionable from the scratch file
6. Copy the actionables to actionables.org
7. Clear, save and close the scratch file, and then go to the next one.

When you have done this for all your scratch files, you are done with the scratch file stage.

The chronological tape stage

You do not actually work in the chronological tapes. That’s what scratch files are for.

However you will often add text directly to the bottom of a chronological tape, skipping the scratch file stage.

Also, you will often search a chronological tape. Emacs allows you to easily search across multiple files, and supports full regular expression search.

There’s not much to say about the chronological tapes. They provide peace of mind that you never lose any text, but you don’t often actively use them.

To refresh your memory, here is a complete list of the chronological tapes:

actionables.org
notes.org
epic-quotes.org
elite-quotes.org
quotes.org
reference.org

A bookmark in the chronological tape marks where you last uploaded text to BrainStormWFO. The bookmark looks like this:

———————————————————
PROCESSED LINE
———————————————————

When you’re ready to process another batch of text, find the bookmark and copy all the text beneath it. Then paste the text into the relevant BrainStormWFO file, under the top-level “Inbox”. Then move the bookmark down to the bottom of the chronological tape.

The BrainStormWFO stage

BrainStormWFO is the fastest way to restructure text outlines. Its speed and flexibility allow you to process high volumes of text. No other program can do this. Therefore the Snippet Loop requires BrainStormWFO.

(I won’t cover the basics of how to use BrainStormWFO here, because that topic is too big.)

You can sort your notes and quotes the same way you would sort anything. Just let categories naturally surface, and build your outline according to your current focus. The result will be an insightful mindmap that is immediately useful for your current objectives.

This is especially helpful when you don’t know enough about a topic to write sufficiently advanced longform text about it. Creating a mindmap will greatly improve your grasp of the subject.

If you can write sufficiently advanced longform text about a topic off the top of your head, then there’s no need to do the extra work to mindmap it.

How advanced is “sufficiently advanced?” That depends on your needs. If you’re writing a college thesis, it’s very advanced. You will almost certainly need to mindmap your notes and research. However, if you’re just rambling about your favorite video game, then mindmapping is optional.

Sorting your actionables requires a completely different procedure. I will not cover that procedure here, since it is better explained as part of the Execution Loop.

The benefits of the Snippet Loop

The Snippet Loop gives you fine grain control over your knowledge, and removes the fear of data loss.

Your text is permanently preserved in chronological tapes, which are never changed. This ensures that nothing you write or copy-paste is ever forgotten.

All that knowledge would be useless if you couldn’t organize it. So the Snippet Loop allows you to build dynamic outlines to reflect the changing structure of your brain. It employs an outlining tool fast enough to process all your text, so that you can be sure the outline is complete. The presence of a secure chronological tape means you can freely delete old material from your outline without worrying about one day needing it again.

The process of mindmapping provides lots of inspiration, stimulation and analytical rigor. It reveals incomplete areas, clarifies priorities, and synthesizes high-level concepts.

Most of all, the Snippet Loop is about peace of mind. Mindmapping is time and brain intensive. It’s nicer to know you CAN do it if truly necessary, than to actually use it all the time. You can usually be more efficient with an 80/20 Pareto approach, by using the Longform Loop and the Execution Loop.

This solution is imperfect and lossy, which would normally cause the loss-averse hindbrain to recoil in horror. But the existence of the Snippet Loop allows another principle, the Procrastination Principle, to counteract this hindbrain paranoia. Namely, when we irrationally fear we’re missing something, we simply tell ourselves that we really ought to mindmap it all out with an official Snippet Loop processing round, and that we cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die promise to get around to it eventually… but hey, something shiny! And we’re off on another productive tangent.

This draws on the truth that it is more effective to make real-world progress, thereby generating paradigm-transforming feedback, than to endlessly analyze our current flawed and incomplete knowledge.