How do you deal with Outlook?
Hello, every body! I have to say I'm a new user of Life Balance. When I use palm, I know this software, can had a try, but I didn't buy it. All these years, I'm using my Outlook as a GTD tool.
These days, I saw the Life Balance has showed on iPhone App Store, and I'm so happy, and then I come here, download the software, and read the whole document, and then I'm deeply attracted by Life Balance, I think this is just what I want.
Now, I'm just trying to fit the Life Balance. I'm wondering, are you use Life Balance for both to-do-list, and calendar? Or you use Life Balance as your to-do-list softeware, but still use Outlook as calendar? I know the to-do-list function in Life Balance is very strong, how about the calendar? Is that as good as Outlook? Can I absolutely throw Outlook away? Thank you!
Depends what you want to do.
Depends what you want to do. LB's calendar is fairly good in itself, but if you need to do things like shared calendaring for your work, or calendar sync with other apps, then you'll be back to Outlook. On the Mac I believe LB syncs with iCal, but that won't help you on Windows
The alarm
I have chosen to keep my calendar in Outlook. Because Life Balance doesn't have an alarm function. Even if I keep Life Balance open all day, I cannot keep watching the to-do-list, which will make me miss some appointment...
Outlook Support??
Please consider adding a syncing capability with MS Outlook. Without that, I can't justify adding additional software that I need to manually coordinate. I am trying to simplify my life, and although Life Balance looks good, I'm not willing to try it without the existence of Outlook syncing.
I hope that you will consider my request. I would think that quite a few people would share this view.
Be careful what you ask for with Outlook
I'm struggling with this same conundrum. I've been using LB on Windows, Mac, iPhone and prior to that Palm. Outlook is a double-edged sword if you work in a large enterprise. Even without thinking of LB, I struggle with Outlook putting junk on my calendar because of the way meeting organizers use it (incorrectly) - and I have little control over that. I sure wouldn't want to drag that noise into LB.
On the other hand, I very much want to be able to see scheduled items and tasks next to each other to navigate my way through the day. Outlook doesn't do that well; LB does - but my scheduled time is driven by Outlook in ways I can't necessarily control. Manually syncing (including filtering and interpreting to condense out the junk) has proven to big a burden; so I currently end up just having both Outlook and LB open next to each other and integrating it in my head. Sure would welcome any smoother approaches...
dF
mixed message
Outlook is such a mainstream corporate tool it will always be supported with third-party tools for sync'ing, extracting data etc. Personally I hate it, but that's just me. All of the below assumes you are using Palm sync'ing, I don't know enough about sync'ing on other platforms without Palm as the "middleware".
For managing my "hard landscape" date-based information, I keep these items linked to project/items within LB's outline but "hidden" within LB's to-do lists by keeping them in a special "hard landscape" Place.
For displaying them, I'm a fanatic DateBk user on the Palm. In fact, LB's DateBk integration allows me to use DB as my day-to-day interface to both my Dates and my regular (non-dated) To-do/actions lists. I wish i could use the v6.2 Palm Desktop conduits so i could start using the new Pimlical Windoze desktop, soon to be ported to some TBA handheld platforms (not iPhone), but I'm using an old GoldMine version for contact management, which conduit doesn't like the upgrade.
My general opinion is that unless you have a very small set of Date-specific items, you will want to use a Calendar-specific tool for managing those. Ideally that would be integrated with Life Balance, at least allowing linking to items within the Outline. It sounds to me that could be Outlook for you, in which case I'd recommend MOVING your non-date specific stuff to Life Balance.
Hope this helps.