Lipstick © Simon EvansDo you need what Stephen R. Covey calls a «Personal Mission Statement»? What for?

Let's leave aside what companies or political parties want to tell you about their so-called mission. Compared to these, drafting a Personal Mission Statement (and updating it from time to time) can be real fun. If you do it well, the statement will give you

• Orientation: What are the values that guide your life?
• Identity: How can you unfold your personality in a world that gets more chaotic, every day?
• Decision support: What should you stick with when you find yourself in a complicated situation?
• Sound relationships: What can other people expect of you?

How do you draft a great Personal Mission Statement? After some thinking, I arrived at a simple set of criteria. My statement shall be  »

The goal of the Ported Open Source Software (POSS) label is simple: to point you to applications that you can safely install on any of your computers and use it for years to come, whether you're online or not, whether you switch to a new operating system or not, whether you can afford buying a new machine every year or not.

In The second part of this mini-series, I'm listing the packages that I'd never want to miss on the systems I use. It's a limited, subjective selection and I'd love to hear from you, in the comments below or via email, about great software that meets the 4 POSS criteria (for  »

Chances are that you, during your career, have used a lot of different software packages, running under several operating systems. I did, too. Much of my data needed to survive all infrastructure changes, over the years. I had more than my fair share of data loss, data corruption, vendors going out of business, insane upgrade schemes & costs and the like.

Saving my data from annihilation has always been, in the end, my job. Sometimes, import features assisted me with migrations. Over the years, things kept speeding up, and I learned the meaning of interoperability, that is: how to find the least lossy, daily transformations to carry data from one application to another and back. Meanwhile, even that isn't fast enough anymore.

Open-Source Software (OSS) alone is not sufficient to cure this disease, because many OSS applications suffer from platform lock-in: While you're on a Windows machine, you don't have that handy Linux application available. While you're working on a Mac, that nifty Windows application is unavailable. While you're working under Linux, WINE can't run the very Windows application that you'd need. While you're on the Web, file sizes are too big to work efficiently. And so on, ad nauseam.

That's why I've come to cherish excellent open source software that tears down those walls by simply running under various platforms. Running. Not just «being portable», but actually ported: applications that you can safely install on any of your computers and use it for years to come, whether you're online or not, whether you switch to a new operating system or not, whether you can afford buying a new machine every year or not.

I've decided to coin a new term for that kind of software and explain what it means in this posting. In part two of this mini-series, I'll list some great software packages that meet the criteria.

So, what is Ported Open Source Software (POSS)?  »

A key asset of every practitioner of Getting Things Done (GTD) is her or his set of Next-Action (NA) Lists.

NAs are not dumped into a single ToDo list. Instead, each list is focused on a given context that allows you to complete the action. According to David Allen, a context describes the tool, location or person that is required to be able to complete an action.

@Home, @Office, @Phone are typical examples. When you arrange your NAs like that, you're obviously in a much better position as soon as you're in the respective context and want to know what you should do now.

But what exactly is a context, and what isn't?  »

You can become effective and efficient not only by doing something, but also by refraining from doing something.

For instance, you might ask yourself how you're currently wasting time, energy and money - and how you could eliminate the causes. The Toyota Production System (TPS) takes this to a higher level. As you can tell by the name, the system is about manufacturing cars. Anyway, if you take a closer look, you realize TPS can  »