Tom Says: Safe code is boring code!
Life Balance is a big, complicated beast. It doesn't look like it, but it is. Every item you add to the list comes with sliders, buttons, date boxes, and drop-downs that will drive you away if you let yourself get sucked in too soon. The software is deceptively well-designed. Read the official walkthrough and see.
But since you're reading this, I assume you want to try. Awesome.
Start by setting the "balance" preference to "not at all." Balance will make things more confusing when you're first starting than they need to be, so just turn it off for now. (If you read the walkthrough, then you know why.) On the PDA, this is under Options > Preferences > Balance > "Encourage me to balance my effort..." In Windows, this is under Edit > Preferences > "Encourage me to balance my effort..."
Now, transfer your current to-do items to Life Balance as a flat list. If you don't have an existing to-do list, add items that you want Life Balance to keep track for you. This is not how you will use Life Balance, but you want your to-do items in there to play with. Set due dates where appropriate (ignoring "Lead Time" for now), but mark them with a symbol so that you can find them easily later.
Life Balance is meant to help you manage your entire life. Thus, the top-level items (TLIs) in your outline are the most important. They are your life goals, or at least the largest centers of importance in your life. You will probably not choose the right TLIs on your first try, but hopefully you will eventually. I've used Life Balance for years, and mine still change. Currently, I have:
These were originally based on "Ratz latest thoughts for a starter template file" (preview here), but changed over time because, obviously, Ratz leads a different life than I do.
Create some TLIs for yourself and move all of your previous tasks to under them. I highly recommend not nesting your tasks yet, grasshopper. Stick with two levels.
You look at the To Do List tab to know what to do next. There is no manual sort: Life Balance sorts tasks according to many things, most relevant of which now is "Importance."
Every item, including the TLIs, has an "importance" slider. The importance slider should reflect how important an item is to its parent. A TLI's parent is "your life as a whole." It is tempting to give TLIs like "do well in school" importance levels of 100%, but this is probably a mistake. Here's why.
When several tasks have a total weighted importance of 100% (all things considered), Life Balance throws its hands in the air and ranks them by their order in the outline. When several tasks reach this state, you're no better off with Life Balance than any other software.
Now, adjust each TLI's importance slider according to how important it is to your life as a whole. On my outline, only "maintain relationships," "stay organized," and "relax" have full importance. The rest have slightly decreased importance, and "don't forget the insignificant" is cut to 50%.
Once that is done, do the same recursively with your second level items (your actual tasks/projects). Set the importance slider for each second-level item according to how important it is to its TLI.
Life Balance is very good at hiding tasks until they are relevant. If you set a due date (and time) for any of your tasks, it's likely that they do not appear on your "To Do List" view. Tasks will not show until twice the lead time before the due date. This is because of what lead times are supposed to represent.
The lead time is the amount of time before the deadline which you'd like to take to complete the task. So before this lead time, the task isn't important to you and isn't shown. But since you probably want a heads-up, the task will appear two lead times before the due date, and slowly rise up to the appropriate level in your list over the time period.
Here's an example. If it takes you 4 days to write a report, set a lead time to some greater amount, like 6 or 8 days. This won't be the only task on your to-do list, so it's better to assume that you will need more time than you do.
Go through each of the items in your outline with due dates and set their lead times appropriately.
Now you should be able to look at your "To Do List" view and see a list that is roughly prioritized how you would do it yourself. If it's not, then this is a great time to start something that you'll be repeating for the rest of your Life Balance career: Tweak! Adjust importance sliders and lead times until the list at least approximates what it should. But the list will never be perfect.
One of the most important things to remember about Life Balance is that it is not meant to tell you what to do. Life Balance reminds you of the things you might think are important right now. I usually scan the first 10 or so items when considering what to do next. The final decision lies with me. I will not mess with importance sliders to ensure that the #1 item is what I want to do next: I'm happy if it's somewhere near the top. I'm simply glad that, even when my list has hundreds of items, I don't have to scan them all to remember what's important to do next.
With this in mind, experiment. If you're like me, you'll use Life Balance for a few weeks, drop it for a few weeks, come back, and continue the cycle for a long time before finally deciding whether it's right for you.
Posted Jun 27, 2007, in the evening.