Getting Things Done is an excellent method for self management. However, most people argue that its bottom-up approach leaves much to be desired when it comes to top-down aspects of self management, like living according to your purpose, dream, vision, values, principles, et cetera. I don’t fully agree with this assessment of GTD but I’ll leave that for a future blog post or two!

My point is: don’t just rely on one approach to self management. Combine best practices from bottom-up and top-down approaches and adapt them to your personal situation! The bottom-up approach is useful for the operational level of your life, but it’s useless without a sound top-down approach for the strategic level of your life.

One top-down tool that can guide your strategic decisions in life is your personal mission statement. Now, here’s the irony: one part of my work consists of encouraging and aiding businesses in determining their mission statement, but I don’t have a personal mission statement (yet)! Of course I understand how important a (personal) mission statement is, but at the same time I realize how hard it is to come up with one that really resonates with who you are and where you want to be!

So, I’m still working on discovering my life’s purpose, my personal mission statement and the corresponding goals. I guess this is true for a lot of people. For those of you who have already found or determined their personal mission statement, I would like you to share it with us in the comments section for inspiration! As an additional request, please share your favorite articles, books or methods for determining your personal mission statement.

Stephen of Productivity in Context came up with the idea of “collecting” personal mission statements.