Cyborganize launched - the ultimate outliner productivity system

Posted by Foolness
Aug 23, 2011 at 08:33 PM

“No in GTD you have to do classification and sorting as soon as tasks are entered into the system. Otherwise you have no way of finding them again. In Cyborganize you just throw them into BrainStorm and sort only to the degree needed to surface your next action. In GTD you have to assign priorities, projects, statuses, etc etc etc. In Cyborganize you just have to clear your inbox and sort the time sensitive to the ?day? level. The rest you can ignore without giving it further classification until needed. It?s an improvement on GTD.”

This may be a case of differing interpretation but GTD does not have priorities or statuses. This is more of the extension of most GTD apps being to-do list software and also because users tend to ask for these features to feel comfortable with sorting tasks.

The book goes into the same process as you mentioned except you are not limited to throwing things into a specific software like Brainstorm. It can be software, paper or anything including memory. The only thing GTD stresses is that you record and write down almost everything (or visualize writing it if you don’t have a gadget or paper around) and then you just clear it and put it into “contexts”.

Context here can mean time of day, location, priority… the important thing is not the category but what is it that you need to do when you need to do it.

For example, if you need to do something with your wife, it’s “@Wife’s name, give her gift at 10 am”.

The distinction GTD has for contexts vs. categories is that you should always phrase categories in terms of @who or @where as a sort of anchor to your brain that if you see the location/person, you will remember it and also to reduce the friction of even thinking up of a category. You just instinctively fill in @ and forget about it.

“Inbox and Weekly Reviews are not Longform Loop categories. Longform Loop categories are unique to the individual. It?s whatever you write about a lot.”

Again I’m sorry if I’m sounding like a defensive GTD fan now. I’m not really a user of GTD.

Weekly Reviews and Inbox are unique to the individual also. That’s why Allen can write an extended book about these despite these being just one or two words is my point.

Longform Loop seems to be unique but unlike GTD terms, Cyborganize doesn’t appear to teach a user how to make Longform loops unique to themselves where as Inboxes are unique based on where you put your items and Weekly Reviews is unique in that you not only set the week you review your items, it can be a fail safe task when you are overloaded.

“T3 is the bottom, T1 is the top, T1 is the wiki. There?s no special effect. It?s just a transition from single unconnected posts to a comprehensive interconnected work.”

My mistake. I guess if there’s no special effect then the question falls into what T2’s importance is. Why wouldn’t a 2 step transition be as effective as a 3 step transition?

“What?”

Well some users prefer search based style notetaking and this was related to the special effect of transitioning and I didn’t want to discount that and I wanted to focus on the implications of frictionless.

If there’s no special transition wouldn’t the switch to T3 to T1 be very friction heavy? Many users could barely be able to start blogs but for them to convert random blogs to a wiki…well that seems like a task in itself.

“It doesn?t. I?m talking about the amount you type, the amount of results you generate, the mental iterations you undergo, the amount of info you consume and process, etc etc etc.”

So let me just rephrase to check if I’m understanding correctly. Cyborganize is a productivity system based on speeding up the method of manipulating any productivity system by utilizing the fastest applications around?

As an analogy for example, Cyborganize would be a person who goes from using the mouse to browse the web to going full keyboard. It’s specifically dealing with the task of speeding up say… notetaking and outlining rather than dealing with the delivery and reception of the actual tasks.

“Deferred is an extremely obnoxious GTD invention, since it must be changed at least twice - once to set it and once to unset it.”

Again this may just be based on differing interpretations but as far as pure GTD goes, I don’t think GTD uses the term deferring. The Someday/Maybe system is more of a recycle bin. You’re supposed to clear the current tasks first and then focus on say dreams or projects without deadlines like choosing whether you want to go back to school or not. It’s more of a scrapbook that for inferior softwares to claim they are GTD apps became something like a category where you have to double back on two lists to get to a master list.

>>Alexander

“By contrast, I would suggest that you use this forum to discuss more the practical employment of each piece (not necessarily all) of the Cyborganize collection of programs in specific steps of the system?s workflow. This way you will probably gain more valuable feedback from this forum?s frequenters.”

I think it’s okay now. It started out like a complete productivity system overview but with JBFrom’s last post, unless I’m mistaken, Cyborganize could essentially be just BrainStorm + a collection of other items that just specifically need a blog.

I’ll wait for JBFrom to correct me if I’m wrong but Cyborganize can be summarized into -> Left Brain = Brainstorm; Right Brain =
Inbox to Blog to Wiki and the loops are talking about the blog and how Brainstorm works and it’s not like GTD and other productivity system where GTD is exclusive and GTD app means an app that tries to follow the principles of GTD.