Cyborganize launched - the ultimate outliner productivity system

Posted by Foolness
Aug 22, 2011 at 07:37 PM

Registered because I absolutely cannot understand Cyborganize. I can’t claim I understand Brainstorm either but with Brainstorm I chucked it to laziness as to why I didn’t bother trying to learn it beyond treating it like an outliner with drag and drop/hotkey organization.

With Cyborganize, all I end up seeing is akin to how professional bloggers set up themselves to create blogs with constantly producing posts.

I would highly appreciate it if anyone can explain the difference.

Here’s how I understand it:

Scratch files are just notes that you stash into one specific program like Brainstorm.

Snippet Processing Loop is basically a list but for the sake of something more advanced, let’s say it’s a file/web page capturing program like Surfulator, Evernote or even something like Google Docs. You could probably even go so far as just use UltraRecall for this.

Longform Processing is basically first using a braindump (Inbox for GTD) and then transferring the brain dump into multiple tag clouds and then moving the multiple tag clouds into categories. (Essentially skipping the processing stage and replacing it with a manual building/database stage)

After that, what happens?

I don’t see the productivity boost. It seems more like training people to create a personal database but the finished database still has to help the maker be productive. If books alone were productive, every one in school would get As.

It basically seems like the idea is to create one panel where these are all notes and on the other side these is your blog editor with the exception that instead of immediately or randomly creating a post from several references… there’s the additional barrier that you just combine the brain dumps of tags with the notes and then reorganize them into categories and voila! You have now produced a webpage.

From what I understood, you could even use the Cyborganize blog page as an example for the finished product of Cyborganize.

You have your categories:

Benefits
BrainStormWFO
Community
Core Workflow
Getting Started
Getting Unstuck
Installation How-To
Scope and Significance
Theory
Uncategorized
User Feedback
Writing

...and then you have contents within your categories.

If these were truly productive though then people wouldn’t have a hard time reading the Cyborganize help files and wouldn’t request for a video. They would, by virtue of the Cyborganize’s categories, understood that these categories were the core essence of the Cyborganize page and the contents are the affirmers of why these categories became relevant i.e. from initiating Cyborganize you were able to narrow down from the bottom up which categories were important motivators for you to understand the essence of Cyborganize.

...which again, is everything in the categories: Without thinking up of specific categories, the process allowed you to generate the category: BrainStorm because you end up understanding that users need to know about BrainStorm to understand Cyborganize. You also had things like Getting Started because you found when you combine and process the dual panes that users need to find a way to get started and instead of thinking “I’ll add getting started” you just let the synchronization flow so that Getting Started just becomes a natural category that grew from brute forcing and random tags. That same sequence helped you create a less used category in Getting Unstuck. The result is that you have a blog that’s organized closer to a static page.

...Yet again the flaw is, no one feels like reading it. At least not enough people. They seem to demand a video first despite your blog categories being more organized. If it’s already problematic that way, then how does it produce a finished product that makes you more productive outside of book/static web page related content where the task list is to create a set of organized pages? I find the argument against outliners seemingly flawed in the same manner. You seem to be pretty much saying outliners can’t work because in outliners you have to cut and paste the contents to move them elsewhere and you can’t collect these cuts in a random jotted out pane. Yet these could easily be fixed by a clipboard manager that gathers snippets into categories not to mention an external text editor or database.