By Bob Freud
"Let's see. It's four o'clock and I'm in Ridgewood at the doctor's office. I'm meeting somebody at six o'clock for dinner. What should I do in the meantime?" Most of us ask ourselves these questions far too often. Life Balance, a new Palm OS program from Llamagraphics, encourages these kinds of questions, and even helps you come up with useful answers.
When you buy a piece of software, you don't usually expect that it's going to ask you to think deeply about your life and what you want it to be about. Life Balance, however, isn't most software. To get the most out of this to-do list and planner, you'll need to ask yourself about your long-term and short-term goals. You'll need to ask yourself how it is you think you ought to be spending your days.
If all this sounds a bit too touchy-feely, don't worry. Life Balance uses your real world answers about your own life priorities to help you look at your to-dos and make sure that doing them is actually taking you where you want to go in life. And if you aren't headed in the right direction, Life Balance will tactfully suggest course alterations.
The problem with to-do lists
If you're like me, you probably have a to-do list. If you're more organized than I am, you may even have prioritized it. The problem is that you look at your list and almost everything on it's marked urgent. Or the things on your list that are most pressing can't be done right at the present moment. One of your to-dos may be to buy stamps at the post office. It's important and you need to do it. However, the post office is closed right now. A smart to-do list shouldn't show you tasks that you can't do.
More seriously, for many of us, the majority of the tasks on your list that you do complete fall into what time management guru Stephen Covey calls the "urgent but not important" area of your life. Here's where Life Balance comes in.
This software shows you the tasks on your list that are urgent but not important, and encourages you to start doing some of the things that you claim are important. Perhaps you always say that exercise is important to you, but you have no time. Maybe you tell yourself that spending time with your family should come first but, somehow, it always comes last. Life Balance will give you the opportunity to make to-dos in these categories a higher priority. It won't force you to re-prioritize, but it will give you that choice.
