Friday Software Spotlight: Life Balance
posted in Software, Macintosh |
My wife derides me for not making new year’s resolutions, which I avoid because the change from December 31 to January 1 seems an arbitrary marker for prioritizing one’s life. Still, for many people, the turning of the calendar to a new year is often a time of reflection, planning and goal-setting. With that in mind, today’s Friday Software Spotlight focuses on Life Balance by Llamagraphics.
The company calls its product “the to do list for real life.” And in many respects, this is true. I’ve been using it for over a year now, and have come to rely on it to keep track of all my activities. For a to list manager, Life Balance has two key features I cannot live without, and one that I cannot stand. First, some background about the software and its positioning.
There are many software applications written for the Mac that enable you to manage your tasks. Apple’s own iCal features tasks with deadlines and reminders, and they can be placed into any one of your calendars, which can be used as categories, contexts (for you GTD fans), or some other organizing schema. OmniGroup’s OmniOutliner includes a to do list template, or you can create your own to do list from scratch to customize it to your needs. Using the Kinkless GTD scripts you can get your GTD swerve on, and sync your tasks with a Palm through it’s use of iCal. Omni plans a release of OmniFocus, a new GTD application. And there are dozens of other applications from the simple to the complex, that allow you to manage your tasks on a Mac.
Life Balance, which also has a Windows version, is rather simple, but has some powerful capabilities. Here’s a basic outline of how you might use it. I’ll discuss each of these items in more detail later.
- Create an outline of your tasks. This can be done in hierarchical fashion, so you can organize your tasks as work or personal, sub-organize them by projects, and so on. If there is a limit to the size of your outline, I haven’t found it.
- Add details about each task. You can decide if the task is due at a specific time and date, is a recurring task on regular intervals, what priority it has, where you can do it (places), how much effort it will take relative to other tasks, and any notes you want to make.
- View your tasks in the order they need to be done. You can continue to view the outline you created in step one, but if you want to see that high priority item that is nested way down in your list, look at the to do list view. It re-sorts all of your tasks into a flat list, placing the highest priority tasks and tasks with approaching due dates at the top.
- Check your progress. As you check things off, Life Balance compares your progress against your highest-level tasks, such as work and personal, and displays a pie chart of how your actual work compares to your goals.
Life Balance is easy to download, install and begin using. You have to be committed to the ideas of work/life balance and/or Getting Things Done to take advantage of its unique features, but it is still a very capable to do list manager otherwise.
The outline view, and the software’s ability to turn this into a to do list, is perhaps its greatest strength. And if you are a GTD disciple, its use of Places for Contexts should serve you well. Life Balance also features import/export functions for Exchange files, allowing you to keep Life Balance and Outlook in Sync. And it has a Palm companion and a sync conduit, offering true synchronization between desktop and Palmtop.
Unfortunately, you can only sync one Life Balance file with your Palm device because the Palm version of the application only supports one file. This works for me, because I like to keep one, continuously updated list at all times, but you may want more than one such list (which you can do on the desktop). Other than the Exchange import/export and HotSync features, Life Balance is a standalone application with little integration with Mac OS X address book, iCal and other applications. And the interface, while generally very usable, doesn’t have a modern OS X feel to it.
But the greatest downside is the name. Life Balance to me sounds a bit self-help-ish and utopian. I prefer the utilitarian and straight-forward nature of Getting Things Done or EasyTask Manager. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I use software called Life Balance.
Still, Life Balance is the only application I’ve found that offers what I consider to be critical features in one package: hierarchical outline view, and true and easy Palm synchronization. And those features alone give me enough reason to recommend it.
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