.KEYWORD lifebalance
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Get organized with Life Balance
.OTHER
.SUMMARY "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. Bob Freud shows us in this article, however, that Life Balance isn’t most software.
.AUTHOR 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.
.H1 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.
.H1 How it works
The Life Balance program has four components: Outline, To-Do List, Places, and Balance. The Outline shows you all your tasks in one place, as shown in Figure A. It’s a formatted list with top-level items (your goals or tasks) and child items (the subtasks or steps you need to take to reach a goal). You can see everything at one time in the Outline view, or condense all child items to look at the big picture. From the Outline, you can access details for each task.
.FIG A In the Outline you set up all of your goals and tasks.
.H1 Details, details
The tabbed Details window in the Outline lets you set a priority for each task, as shown in Figure B; a specific, recurring, or occasional date for each task; and a place where the task can be done. When you set a date for a task, the date is posted into your Palm address book.
.FIG B The slider lets you set a priority for each task in the Details window.
.H1 The places
When you enter details for a task, one of your choices is Place. What Life Balance calls a place is really a situation. A place can be a physical place like the post office or the bank (you can even include the hours these places are open, as shown in Figure C). You’re also encouraged to use places for situations, such as when I’m tired, when I’m with Betty, when I’m on the Web, etc.
.FIG C On your list of Places you can include the hours a place is open.
One place can include other places. Let’s say that good health is one of your goals, and that exercising is a sub-goal you need to do to achieve this. You can exercise at the fitness center at work or at the health club that you belong to. In Life Balance, you can create a place called Workout, which includes the places health club and work. You’re also able to include notes about each place, as shown in Figure D. That way when you’re at work, Life Balance will remind you that one of the choices on your to-do list is working out. You might even create places (or situations) such as "when I’m tired" or "when I’m standing on line" and connect tasks to those Places.
.FIG D You can also include notes about each place in your list of places.
.H1 To-dos I can really do
Once I’ve told Life Balance what I need to get done and when and where I can get these tasks accomplished, I switch to the To-Do List. If I choose to show all, I get my entire to-do list sorted by priority and lead time. If I choose a certain place, Life Balance will filter the task list to show me only tasks that I can actually get done in the place that I am. This is also good for preplanning for the next day.
.H1 Balancing act
The Balance section shows you two pie charts, as shown in Figure E. The pie on the right is generated when you check off to-dos that you’ve completed. This shows you where you’re actually spending your time. The pie on the left shows you the same main goals, but you can drag the pieces to represent what percentage of your time should be spent on it. If you spend 5% of your time on Home but think that this ought to be 15%, you drag the pie slice clockwise with your Palm stylus. Now your to-do list will be updated and Home tasks will be shown to you higher up on your to-do list.
As you finish one of your to-dos, Life Balance gives you credit on your pie chart. So that you don’t rest on your laurels, the program can be told how long to keep on giving you credit for a completed task. If you took your son to a little league game two weeks ago, that was a great thing to do, but it’s probably time for another parent-son outing.
.FIG E The Balance pie charts let you see how close you’re coming to your stated goals.
.H1 Future Development
Although I really like Life Balance, it needs a desktop application in order to be really useful to me. I just can’t see myself doing serious life planning in Graffiti. The folks at Llamagraphics told me they’re committed to a Mac and Windows desktop application. This will also make Life Balance useful to those people who don’t use Palm devices.
In addition, and in some ways more pressing, the ability to export my to-do lists to the Memo Pad and thus be able to print them is crucial. I’d also like to see the ability to export to HTML. Beyond this, groupware is a logical development. A groupware version of Life Balance with the ability to share certain parts of a task list, and not others, could be a killer business application.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Life Balance, visit http://www.llamagraphics.com.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Bob Freud is an active PalmPilot enthusiast and the Coordinator for the Center for Instructional Technology at Bergen Community College. He can be reached via email at rfreud@mailhost.bergen.cc.nj.us.
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