It’s late, and if I were more wary and self-protective (in-joke, folks, honest) I would set this aside til tomorrow. But then I’d never get back to it. So, at the end of a too-long Sunday, I’ll sally forth with the reasonable confidence that what I write will be “good enough” (compared to sweet nada.)

Recall how you and I tweeted back and forth, wrastling a bit about the term “humble”?
“Good enough” is like that.

Let’s say you’re the heavy weight. Let’s say I’m a long-passed it sparring partner. I know more than nothing. What you think isn’t the point. So we spar. You and the practice come away the better for it (so long as I manage to not have my block knocked off … that would be *cough* on the Debit side in the books.)

Scenario: hard-pressed lean teams assemble in the caf’ to hear recently placed CEO expound wisely on their avionics R&D project. (We’re talking landing systems … we’re talking Fed … we’re talking MIL-SPEC … we’re talking busting balls and guts left right and center).

CEO’s theme *feckless twat I called him, feckless twat I call him, feckless twat I’ll call him again*? “”Good enough” is good enough”.

You could /feel/ the breath drain out of folks’ lungs. Their fixed point was a landing system that landed tin-cans full of squishy paying customers safely. “Good enough”?! Operationally, existentially, experientally … an honest man has to ask: “WTF??!”

Too complicated for a take-away. So, old bummer that I am, I boiled it down to this:

We very usually fall short of our aim.
When we aim for “very good” we might, with honest effort, find ourselves rewarded for “good enough”.
If, for some reason, we aim at “good enough” then we should dare hope to get away with mediocre.

–bentrem

I discovered a long time ago that the MOST important factor to organizing your self is ‘you’, not ‘the tool’.

My experience with Palm, which was excellent but is now on it’s way to irrelevance, has made me a believer in using the absolute simplest organization tools feasibly possible. I now am organizing my to do’s strictly using e-mail! Using David Allen’s approach which is to list everything — I just list everything under headers that designate their context (such as @computer, or @phone, or @supermarket or @airport). I know that will work from now until I pass away — so no more specialized pims for me!! Once I am fully off the palm, I will likely have my contact information and other related ‘PIM’ info in text files or some other (truly) open format on a secure usb drive.

For businesses I wonder if any software vendor can afford to put out ‘bad enough software’ without significant risk. The ’software vendors’taking that approach are at peril of losing their relevance.

Note: Another type of software that I consider ‘bad enough’ is personal finance software such as Quicken or Microsoft Money. I used such software for 2-3 years and gave up because the ‘learning’ and ‘idiosyncracies’ overhead you need to deal with do not provide a sufficient ROI on your time investment. Life is to short and complicating it unnecessarily does not seem wise!!

I’m bound to years of Outlook for the same reason you list – too hard to switch and for me, no compelling reason.

My Palm Treo700p easily syncs with Outlook and lo and behold, so does the iPod Touch that I bought my wife for Christmas.

There would have to be a compelling reason to switch and frankly, I don’t know what that would be.

Price