radiant.matrix

As a proponent of David Allen’s GTD system, and a person who’s about 60lbs. over his target weight, I’ve been anxious to find ways to use GTD-like approaches to manage my fitness and nutrition goals.

I use the Hipster PDA approach — 3×5 cards in a Moleskine folio. And, while blank 3×5 cards are indispensable, I find that the DIY Planner HPDA offers a number of 3×5 forms that are extremely helpful.

When I stumbled across the Portion Teller post on Get Fit Slowly, I knew there was something I could do that fit well with my system, so here it is:

• Pyramid Check 3×5 4-UP Letter [ODG] is forthcoming
• Pyramid Check 3×5 4-UP Letter [PDF]

Pyramid Check Form by Darren Meyer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

English is not the language of business, it’s “bureaucratese”. Much like legalese, bureaucratese sounds much like English — except that the words all have special meanings, and there is a specialized syntax and grammar that’s only intelligible to licensed bureaucrats. Bureaucratese appears to descend directly from modern politic dialects, but in fact developed in parallel.

Example translations:

(english) “This policy has conflicting statements.” (bureaucratese) “This policy document contains several statements that, when taken individually, align effectively with our core goals and vision, but when compared create an appearance of complexity that is non-trival to resolve.”

(english) “This problem is intractable.” (bureaucratese) “We’re facing a challenge, and while we have every confidence that challenge can be met, we do have to consider whether we have the resources to meet it, and if so doing would result in net fiscal and intangible gains.”

Complicating the problem of translation, of course, is the complete lack of scholarly material on the matter. Even phrase books are difficult to come by.