Cyborganize launched - the ultimate outliner productivity system

Posted by JBfromBrainStormWFO
Jul 20, 2011 at 03:28 AM

Whoah… I just checked out Maxthink. Last time I looked at it I never got past the ridiculous intro video. This time I successfully navigated to the features demo vid.

Maxthink is the only program I’ve ever seen that could substitute for BrainStormWFO in Cyborganize. It has the same mark sorting capacity.

It looks a great deal more complicated than BrainStormWFO, and I’m not sure how well it scales, but I certainly like the perpetual undo function. It could also be more mature and stable, I’m not sure. The display is more cluttered but to compensate you need fewer keystrokes since marks are always present. Anyway, an impressive program.

Aha - I think I just found its fatal flaw. Maxthink only has one pane. In BrainStormWFO I’m almost always working with two panes. Whew, I guess we can keep the “world’s fastest outliner” title, although just by a hair.

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Cassius wrote: “Gee, this sounds very much like what Neil Larson says about his MaxThink.”

Yes, we are all trying to accomplish the same goals in this space. MaxThink is similar in scope and function to BrainStormWFO. Everything that MaxThink can do falls under the Snippet Loop, which is just 1/3 of Cyborganize’s total capabilities.

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Chris Murtland wrote: “I see the merits of BrainStorm (forced focus and quick rearranging) and keeping things segmented based on source (internal/external) and level of polish or completeness. “

Awesome!

“there is a lot of copying and pasting, and things live in multiple places”

Really it’s not. I spend vastly less time organizing with Cyborganize than with any of my previous systems. It’s all automatic, no thinking involved, so it goes very fast. And it’s batchable.

As for things living in multiple places, they do, but in different forms, each providing a unique affordance. You won’t feel you’re duplicating effort. And you won’t feel like you don’t know which location is canonical. Depending on your purpose, it will be obvious where to look.

“it would be nice to see some specific examples or scenarios like taking an incoming client email that contains 10 tasks of varying complexity and timeframes and processing that through the system.”

In GTD there would be just one way of doing this. In Cyborganize, you have a lot of freedom. The major determinants are the complexity involved and whether you forget key information.

Here’s how I’d personally handle that email:
1. Read it in Gmail, if it’s not urgent star it, make an actionable to come back to it in some timeframe
2. After sorting my actionables, and executing until I come to the entry again, begin working on the email
3. Copy the email over into a scratch file, and also into “quotes” if necessary.
4. Digest the email line by line in the scratch file. Create notes and actionables. Execute some of them on the spot.
5. Create more scratch files if necessary as I continue to work, gaining the benefits of a contiguous work session.
6. Eventually I’ll hit stopping points or lose interest.
5. If nothing else is urgent, let the scratch files sit until I batch process them.
6. When they’re batch processed, their actionables will go back into the Snippet Loop, and some of the scratch files may also be copied into the T3 layer for permanent preservation.

As far as time and deadlines, you’ll need a calendar app, or perhaps even a full GTD or project management app, if your work involves complex inflexible time and resource constraints. That’s fine. These tools will not become overloaded because you will use them only for what they do best.

If you need to set a number of deadlines for yourself, I would set the urgent ones at #1, and the rest somewhere between #2 - #4.

The relevant point is that deadlines and constraints evolve as our execution and priority trees evolve. So Cyborganize focuses on flexibility and dynamism, whereas traditional scheduling and resource management apps overwhelm you in a wealth of concrete individual settings that must be modified every time your paradigm shifts.

“The system seems rather introspective, which is not bad - but work is often full of competing, external demands.”

Actually no, Cyborganize achieves self-knowledge and personal growth WITHOUT spending time on introspection. GTD is an introspective system because it forces you to do reviews, pay attention to completed tasks, etc. This is unnatural because our mammalian minds always want to move forward. Cyborganize just permits you to continually clear your mind, and helps the different mental modes to talk with each other, and helps to surface your true opinions and priorities, all of which naturally leads to the benefits above.

“I get a little lost on the need for two blogs and a wiki? couldn?t these just be three folders of text files, for example?”

No it couldn’t. You need to have conveniently searchable, editable, categorizable, date-stamped and readable T3, T2 and T1 CMS’s.

You COULD use Evernote for your T3 or T2 blogs, as long as you kept them separate from your chron tapes and each other. But I think Wordpress is the best solution. It’s very extensible and open and user-friendly in all senses.

“Do you use namesakes at all?”

No I do not. Web interlinking violates the focus principle of the outline. And namesakes are a poor implementation of web interlinking. If I wanted that, I’d use TheBrain.

“It seems like that might be a way to preserve the chronological order within BrainStorm while still sorting the same entries conceptually in another part of the model.”

Stay away from the dark side, young Jedi! You cannot do this in the Snippet Loop. To try will drive you mad. Everything there is being constantly rewritten and rearranged… datestamping is hopeless.