Hi there Kelly,

Good to hear from you. There are lots of moms (and dads) out there using Life Balance to take care of their daily routines. Any situation where you are juggling your time.

Sounds like you are off to a good start too, and you bring up a couple of excellent points.

First thing to clear up... dialing back the effort slider is not going to postpone the task. The effort setting is how much that task is worth to its slice in the pie charts. If they are quick and easy tasks, then setting the effort to be small is certainly fine.

In the latest desktop versions of the software, you can also postpone, defer or skip a task, and that could be useful to you. Look for that in the menus.

However, the thought I had in reading your post is that you probably would benefit from really concentrating on the patterns of those routine items. You indicated that you have many tasks that are set to every day or every other day. Think about whether that represents what you are actually doing now? Or is that a goal or an ideal for what you would do if you were also a super-human mom?

Stay at home moms are incredibly busy, so it may be an accurate (and perhaps daunting) representation of what you are actually doing now. If that is the situation, then I would recommend that you make careful use of places (and hours) so that you can filter down the list to something that is less scary when you look at it. There may be some things that you can gather up into errands, or phone calls. You might find the audio podcast about using places in Life Balance to be a help.

Also, spend some time setting the importance sliders (don't make them all essential). This has the most oomph if set the importance for the projects at the highest levels in the Outline.

Another technique that some folks use for household chores (as opposed to the other ninety gazillion things you are probably taking care of) is to set up some work zones. So you can just look at the tasks for the living room... and then move on to the kitchen. My house is small, so I personally don't bother with that, but for larger houses, you need to plan how many trips up and down the stairs you are going to make in a day. Doing the tasks by zones is a useful way to keep from getting shin splints. :-)

If you find that you are aiming for an ideal where you imagine that you might need a red cape and a mask to do it all, then you might want to set some of the patterns to be longer intervals with longer leadtimes. Which tasks can be done once every three days? five days? Watch for what really needs to be done and make little adjustments to the intervals by observations of the real state of things. For a household cleaning example, you might have set up a schedule for vacuuming that is equal for all the rooms, but one of the rooms is on the third floor and it is simply used less often. Look for when those dust bunnies are in danger of really getting the upper hand. :-)

Tuning your intervals and their leadtimes will also keep the tasks visible so that you can do them if there is extra time. (Ha!) Or you could put your feet up for a just few minutes... that might be good task to be sure to add to your list too.

Anyway, we're with you! Keep at it!

Best wishes,

--Catherine--*