Life Balance™ for Newton walkthrough
This walkthrough with screen shots from the software should help you get an idea of how Life Balance works.
Life Balance is built around an outliner where you can take the major parts of your life (like work, home, and leisure), list your goals for each part, and break those goals down until they become bite-sized tasks. You can rearrange your outline simply by dragging items where you want them. Tapping on the triangles collapses and expands the outline.
You can print, fax, or email your outline or a portion of it. Sections of the outline can also be beamed to another Life Balance user if the two of you are collaborating on a project. If that person beams the items back to you, your outline is updated with any information that has changed -- even if you have rearranged your outline in the meantime.
Double-tapping on any item in the Outline brings up details about the item. Here you can edit the item's description, assign it an importance, specify where the item must be done, and set when and how often it must be done.
Priorities in Life Balance work differently than in most other planning systems. Rather than asking you to decide how important something is relative to everything else you have to do, Life Balance only asks you to determine how important a task is to accomplishing the goal that you specified above it in the outline.
This system not only simplifies your decision-making, it allows you to reprioritize entire sections of your outline by dragging a single slider.
Items in your outline may happen "once", "routinely", or "according to Dates". "Routinely" is good for chores -- like doing the laundry -- that need to be done regularly, but not necessarily on a particular day. "According to Dates" is appropriate for meetings and other tasks that must be done on a specific day at a specific time.
When you choose "according to Dates", Life Balance cross-posts the item to the Newton's built-in Date Book, where you can print calendars, set alarms, and do other cool things.
You can customize the list of places that Life Balances knows about in the Places section. A place can represent an actual place like a store, or a situation like "near a phone" or "meeting with Bill". Since the places are independent of the projects in your outline, it's easy to indicate that something for home needs to be done at work -- like calling the plumber from your office when she'll be in.
Places can include other places, so you can teach Life Balance that there's a bank at the mall. That way, whenever you're at the mall, Life Balance will also remind you of anything you have to do at the bank.
You can also specify the hours that a place is open. This keeps Life Balance from suggesting that you go to a place that's closed, like trying to buy stamps at the Post Office on Sunday morning.
The to-do list is where Life Balance really shines. Just choose where you are from the pop-up menu at the top of the screen and tap "Update", and Life Balance looks through your entire outline, pulls out just the tasks that you can do in your current location, and sorts them with the most important tasks on the top. You can check off items in any order and scroll down to see the lower-priority items if you want to, but most of the time Life Balance does a remarkable job of recommending where you should be focusing your attention.
In the Accomplishments section you can get a list of the tasks you've checked off, either overall or per-project. Like the other lists in Life Balance, this list can be printed, faxed, or emailed.
The pie charts at the top of the accomplishments screen are really what give Life Balance its name. The pie chart on the right shows how you have been apportioning your time among your toplevel projects. The pie chart of the left lets you specify how you would like to be spending your time. You can change the relative sizes of the pie slices on the left by simply dragging them with your pen.
If the two pie charts don't match, you can ask Life Balance to adjust the priorities in your to-do list to encourage you to work on projects that haven't been getting enough of your time. If you're a workaholic, this is a great way to encourage yourself to take some time off once in a while.
Life Balance runs on any Newton-compatible PDA. The software and a reasonable-sized outline take up about 300K of storage. The size of your outline is limited only by the amount of storage available.
