Balance

The Balance panel in Life Balance lets you set how you would like to spend your time, see how you have been spending your time, and review a list of your accomplishments. This information is not just a visual record of the status of your tasks. The information from the Balance section also dynamically feeds back into your To Do List priorities to help you achieve your desired balance.

Balancing Your Efforts

In the Balance section, the Desired pie chart as a whole represents the total time and effort you can assign to life goals. Each slice corresponds to a top-level section of your Outline. The colors of the pie chart slices match the colors for the sections in the Outline.

The size of each slice represents the proportion of your effort that you want to spend on that top-level goal.

When you tap on a slice, the name of that top-level goal will appear below the pie charts. To adjust the slices in the Desired pie chart, drag a slice clockwise to make it larger, or counterclockwise to make it smaller. The other slices will adjust to make room for your change.

Tip: On the iPhone, you may find it helpful to rotate the screen to make the pie charts bigger.

The Actual pie chart reports how you have been spending your effort. Every time you check off a task in Life Balance, a certain amount of credit is awarded to the corresponding slice of the Actual pie chart. You'll even get extra credit each time you complete a repeating task. By default, each task that you check off is weighted equally. See Effort for a discussion of effort and how to adjust the awarding of credit.

The credit values that accumulate in your Actual pie chart do not last forever. As time passes, the credit for older tasks slowly goes away and is replaced by more recent activity. Balance describes how to adjust the rate at which older credits go away.

By default, Life Balance actively adjusts the priorities in your To Do List to help you get the two pie charts to match over time. It raises the priority of tasks in sections of your outline that have not received enough attention, and reduces the priority of tasks for projects that have been more active than you desired. You can control the strength of this feedback in the preferences. See Balance for more information.