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Tapping on the name of a task brings up the Task Details, where you can view and 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.

Effort is an abstract term that can be used to apply to time spent, task complexity, or even task stressfulness. Generally it is a good Life Balance practice to break your goals down into what feel like manageable tasks. This is certainly less overwhelming for tackling long range plans, and if you do this consistently, you may not need to adjust the Effort slider at all.

Items in your outline may happen “Once”, “Routinely”, “By due date”, or “By calendar”. “Routinely” is good for chores — like doing the laundry — that need to be done regularly, but not necessarily on a particular day. “By calendar” is appropriate for meetings and other tasks that must be done on a specific day at a specific time. “By due date” is useful for non repeating tasks that have a due date, but that don't really need to be posted to your calendar.

When you choose “By calendar”, Life Balance posts the item to its built-in perpetual Calendar and Agenda views.

Life Balance allows you to have notes about the item. This can be handy in unexpected ways. For instance, you can have a single item for “stop by the convenience store,” then include the things you wish to pick up on your way home in your notes.

The built-in perpetual calendar gives you a quick overview of which days have scheduled events. The top section of the calendar view quickly scrolls through the months. Touching a date displays the events on that day. You can select the event to reveal more detail. New events can be scheduled directly from the calendar. The bottom section of the screen also scrolls if you have a lot of appointments scheduled on that day.

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 at a time when you know you can reach her.

Places can include other places, so you can teach Life Balance that there's a Grocery Store 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 Grocery Store.

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.

You can add notes to your Places for driving directions or admission prices.

The to-do list is where Life Balance really shines. Just choose where you are from the information screen on the flip-side of the to-do list 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.

You can tell Life Balance to only include tasks for Places that are Open, and this will keep life Balance from displaying tasks in your To Do List if the Place where it needs to be done is Closed. If you need to see the whole list, you can toggle the setting back to include closed places.

You can use the to-do list to filter settings to look only at tasks that you can do “Anywhere”, or see all your tasks by asking for “All Places.”

The more information you give Life Balance about your tasks, the more accurately your To Do List will reflect your priorities, deadlines and goals. Life Balance default values are reasonably set to err on the side of encouraging you to get something done.

In the Balance section you can get a high-level view of how you've been allocating your time among the top-level goals in your outline.

The pie charts in the Balance section are really what give Life Balance its name. The pie chart on the bottom shows how you have been apportioning your time among your top-level goals. The pie chart on the top 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 finger.

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.

If you tend to procrastinate, this is a gentle, guiltless way to push yourself a little harder.