.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Balancing your year with Life Balance
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY Maybe you’ve set yourself a few goals for 2005. Maybe you want to set some goals, but you’ve been unsuccessful in the past. Or maybe you have so many goals you don’t even know where to start. Author Heather Wardell has the answer in the form of Life Balance from Llamagraphics.
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Happy New Year!
Maybe you’ve set yourself a few goals for 2005–lose weight, be a better friend or family member, keep your house clean, make a million dollars. Maybe you want to set some goals, but have been unsuccessful many times before. And maybe you have so many goals that you don’t even know where to start.
Life Balance can help you.
Life Balance from Llamagraphics, available for Palm OS, Windows, and Macintosh, is much more than a To Do list. The software asks you to think about your priorities in life, and then helps you decide what you should be doing right now, wherever you are at the moment.
.H1 Life Balance in a nutshell
First, you decide what your main goals are. These are your top-level tasks. Then, you decide on projects to help you meet each goal. For each project, you define the tasks that need to be done in order to complete the project. Figure A shows one of my main goals (Listen to myself) with several projects (Relax, Decide on taking tarot course, etc.), and one project (Journal regularly) with a sub-task of investigating journaling software for my Zire.
.FIGPAIR A The hierarchy of tasks in my Outline.
While entering your tasks into the Outline, you put them into "places" (more on this below), and set the relative importance of each task to your life as a whole. Life Balance then sorts your list of tasks, showing you the most important things for you to do right now. You can see the overall most important things to be doing, or the most important things based on where you are right now.
When you complete tasks, you check them off. In the Balance screen, Life Balance shows you how your top-level tasks are weighted (which tasks are the most important), then shows you where you’re spending most of your time and effort. This allows you to decide whether you’re using your time and energy effectively, or whether you need to change your focus in order to achieve your goals.
.BREAK_EMAIL Click here to find out how to put your life in balance.
.H1 First things first or, Do as I say, not as I do
Without a doubt, the first thing to do is to read the Life Balance Advice Book. Available for free at the Llamagraphics Web site, the Advice Book gives substantial detail on how Life Balance works, how best to set up your tasks, and places to maximize what Life Balance can do for you. The Advice Book is even available in a number of e-book formats for reading directly on your Palm. I highly recommend it.
That being said, I didn’t read it until I’d been using Life Balance for two weeks. This would explain why I ended up re-creating my tasks and places three times because they didn’t end up making sense for me. (New Year’s Resolution Number 1: Read the manual!)
At the very least, you should read the Introduction section of the manual. It explains the Life Balance philosophy, details some of its more unusual and interesting features, and gives some high-level suggestions for how to create your tasks and places.
.H1 Everything in its place
Before you enter your tasks, you need to give a bit of thought to your choice of places. The word "place" implies a physical location, but Life Balance isn’t that restrictive. You can use situations as well.
The Advice Book suggests that as a place, you can use "anything that it would be useful for you to sort by in your Life Balance to do list". Some of my places include: Errands, Home, When I have privacy (which will include tasks like Plan for next week, and Write journal), and Workplaces.
Places can include other places. As Figure B shows, I’ve included Somerset Academy (where I teach) and Writing in my Workplaces.
.FIGPAIR B Including places in other places can be very useful.
If I am in a working mood while at home, I can ask Life Balance to show me all "Workplaces" tasks, and will get both school tasks and writing ones. If I am at school, Life Balance can show me only my "Somerset Academy" tasks. Again, a little careful thought in how you set up your places will save you a lot of time later. (New Year’s Resolution Number 2: Plan ahead!)
One cautionary note–in one of my earlier attempts, I left a lot of tasks with a place of Anywhere. When I then filtered my task list by, say, my Workplaces, I also got all of those Anywhere tasks. While this does make sense, I suggest you only give a task a place of Anywhere if you truly can do that task anywhere at any time. A task like Deep Breath! might work here.
.H1 Entering tasks
A key part of entering a task is the Details section. This is where you set the importance of the task to its parent, and the level of effort it requires. Life Balance gives you credit on the Balance screen for achieving your tasks, with the amount of credit depending on the weight given to importance and effort, right back to the parent task.
In Figure C, you’re setting the importance of the Revise and submit Life Balance article task.
.FIGPAIR C The Importance and Effort (not shown) sliders are continuous, allowing you to pick exactly how to set each task.
One thing that makes Life Balance so different is that you’re not setting this task’s priority against your other tasks. Instead, this is simply how important this task is to your life. Many tasks can have the same level of importance. Life Balance uses a task’s importance (as well as the importance of the tasks above it) in determining how high up the task will appear on your To Do list.
You can also set a task’s Effort (how hard it is for you to complete the task–more difficult tasks earn you more credit) and how it’s scheduled (once, routinely, repeating, on a certain date, or on a certain date and added to your Date Book).
.H1 Once the tasks are entered
So, all of your tasks are now entered. Great! Now it’s time to actually complete some of them. (New Year’s Resolution Number 3: Stop procrastinating!)
Life Balance’s To Do list starts out by showing you all tasks available in all places. You can choose to change this view to show only those tasks from a certain place, or only tasks that you can complete anywhere. Figure D shows the Palm version of the To Do list, using a graphic from the Advice Book.
.FIGPAIR D The To Do list, showing tasks from all places.
When you’ve completed a task, you check it off. To avoid constantly re-creating the To Do list, the Palm version doesn’t remove the task from the list until you press Update.
Some tasks won’t appear on your To Do list. Obviously, tasks that aren’t in the currently displayed place won’t show up. Tasks whose importance has been set to None won’t appear (which gives you a great way to put a task on hold), and neither will tasks with subtasks (although the subtasks will appear).
A task that has subtasks will appear once all of the subtasks have been checked off. This gives you an opportunity to make sure that you really have finished everything that needs to be done for that particular task.
For example, if you have a task of Plan vacation, when you’ve finished all of its subtasks (Research resorts, Get travel insurance) you’ll get one last chance to make sure you’ve finished all needed things (Get passport?) before checking off the Vacation task.
.H1 Getting credit for your hard work
As you merrily complete and check off tasks, Life Balance keeps track of them all. On the Balance screen, you can see how you’re doing on each of your top-level tasks.
The screen shows two pie graphs. The one on the left shows the current desired weighting of your top-level tasks (which you can change by dragging the pie slices), the one on the right shows you what progress you’ve actually made toward each of those top-level tasks.
In Figure E, the blue Listen to myself slice on the Actual graph is much larger than on the left-hand Desired one.
.FIGPAIR E Your Desired task weighting doesn’t match your Actual completed tasks.
This means I’ve been putting more time and effort into this task than I said I wanted to.
At this point, there are two choices. I can either put more effort into tasks in other areas of my goals, or I can adjust the Desired graph. I would do this if my priorities had changed and the Listen to myself goal had become much more important.
Life Balance notices when your Desired and Actual graphs are not in sync, and it’ll push tasks up and down your To Do list to encourage you to do more in those areas that haven’t received enough of your attention. The Preferences section will let you set how much of this adjustment Life Balance will do, as well as how long you continue to get credit for completed tasks.
Under the two graphs is a list of your accomplishments. On a day when you feel nothing is getting done, it can be very comforting to see how much you really have completed. When all you’ve accomplished is Relax!, it’s either been a bad day at work, or a good day on vacation!
.H1 It’s good to be in balance
Overall, Life Balance is excellent software. I did have to consult Llamagraphics for support on one occasion (caused directly by my not reading the Advice Book) and they were very helpful, with no hint of "well, if you’d read the manual…" in their response (which I would have richly deserved!).
Synchronization between my Zire 71 and my Windows XP desktop was flawless, and Life Balance can integrate with your Palm’s built-in To Do list. As I don’t use mine, I didn’t do much with this feature, but it did appear very powerful.
Llamagraphics offers a full 30-day trial period, and I strongly recommend you give it a full trial. The first few days can be awkward; entering tasks (especially if you don’t read the Advice Book first!) can be tricky, and getting my head around the "the software is going to tell me what to do next?" concept was very difficult.
Suddenly, though, it all just clicked. The software isn’t telling me what to do; it’s a guide, a coach, to help me make good choices and to help me really focus on what I say I really want to do. If I don’t do those things, I find myself re-evaluating what I say and what I actually do, and my life gets closer to balance as a result.
New Year’s Resolution Number 5: Use Life Balance every day, and write a follow-up article in December 2005!
I would have to say that Life Balance rates a 5. I genuinely can’t think of anything the program should be doing differently.
.RATING 5
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Life Balance, visit http://www.llamagraphics.com.
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.BIO
