Last time we started to talk about “clarifying”, figuring out what some piece of “stuff” means to you. We talked about Trash, Reference, and the Someday/Maybe list. Now we’re going to talk about what happens when something is actionable. This “episode” of the series is big. It contains one of the most clever tricks of … Continue reading “Getting Things Done”: Projects, Next Actions, and Contexts
A couple posts ago I covered the complete workflow summary, and then I told you lots of things about capturing stuff. Now we’ll talk about the “clarifying” steps, where you decide whether something is: trash, someday/maybe, reference, or actionable. Is this thing trash? Very simple: If you’re not sure if something is trash, then it isn’t (at least … Continue reading “Getting Things Done”: Clarifying
In our last post we gave you a summary of the whole GTD process. Now let’s talk about what might be the most important step, the first one: capturing. If you get good at just capturing, even if you’re not great at organizing what you’ve captured … you’ll be ahead of lots of people. (But don’t … Continue reading “Getting Things Done”: Capturing
Okay. I can write a lot more about the details of each of these things, and I probably will. But I’m gonna start by summarizing the core workflow of GTD. When you are confronted with “stuff”, you need to figure out what needs to be done with it. What is “stuff”? I’ll quote David Allen … Continue reading “Getting Things Done”: The workflow
(If you’d like to know about why I started doing the GTD system, read the previous post.) I’m not going to summarize the Getting Things Done (hereafter, GTD) principles quite the way David Allen might. Rather, I’m going to start with what I think are some great takeaways from it. These principles alone can be … Continue reading “Getting Things Done”: Some principles
Less than three months after the death of my mom (which inspired me to write a series of blog posts for everyone else to learn from what I went through in handling her estate), I received a promotion at work. I went from being a technical person in IT, to being a manager. For the … Continue reading “Getting Things Done”: Why now?
Korean was originally written using Chinese characters, much like Japanese was, because both Korea and Japan looked at China as the big refined center of culture and civilization in the world. But Chinese is a terrible script for Korean, arguably worse than it is for Japanese, because Korean loves to form words with tons of prefixes … Continue reading Hangul Part 4: The King
Okay. “Gangnam” was easy: two syllables. Why is “Style” written as three syllables? There’s two linguistic reasons for this: clusters, and diphthongs. Bear with me. Clusters I told you that Korean doesn’t like consonant clusters in syllables. One at the beginning and one at the end at most. So the “ST” at the beginning of … Continue reading Hangul Part 3: Style
All right. In the previous post we talked about how syllable blocks fit together in Hangul. Now we’re ready to break down the song’s title into its individual jamo. Remember that a jamo is a Korean “letter”, and that in Hangul you pack the jamo into blocks of two or three symbols to make syllables. “gang” Let’s … Continue reading Hangul Part 2: Jamo
My friends know I love languages and linguistics. Today I wanted to share with you one of the most amazingly elegant and beautiful writing systems in the world: Hangul (also spelled hangeul in English, but properly spelled 한글 in the system itself), the system used for writing Korean. In order to approach this — and I hope … Continue reading The amazing Hangul system, part 1: Syllables