Tips and Hints

Life Balance is a feature rich program that can be set up to your individual needs. The Life Balance User Forums are an important resource for sharing tips and hints. We can only provide a small sample of key ideas here to get you started.

Fixing the Order of the To Do List

If a task in your To Do List isn't appearing where you expect it to, here are some things to check:

• The importance slider of the item
• The importance sliders of the goals that contain the item
• The lead time, if the item happens routinely, By due date, or By Date Book
• The size of the Desired pie slices in the Balance section.
• The settings described in Balance.

These settings determine the position of a task or goal in the To Do List.

Setting up a default place

Whenever you create a new subtask in the outline, its place is set the same as its parents place.

If you are going to enter several subtasks that happen in the same place, then you can save time by setting the place of the general task before you create the subtasks.

Running errands efficiently

If there are several places nearby each other, like stores in the same town or the same shopping center, create a special place for that town or shopping center, and include those places in the more general place.

Then, when you are about to make a trip, choose the more general place from the menu at the top of your To Do List so that Life Balance can remind you of other things to do in the area.

Planning for Rewards

Life Balance can help you reward yourself for your accomplishments or take breaks during your workday. The key is to create a special top-level section of your outline for rewards and leisure.

Create a top-level section in your outline named “Take a break” or “Have some fun”. In the Task Details for this section, check off the box labeled “Complete subtasks in order”. This will ensure that only one reward will appear on your To Do List at a time.

Under this section, list things that you particularly enjoy. Try to list items that you can do quickly on the spur of the moment.

Because of the balancing feature of Life Balance, one task from this section of your outline will appear on your To Do List whenever it’s been too long since you’ve taken a break. You can adjust how often these items appear by adjusting the size of the slice for this section of your outline in the Desired pie chart. Making the slice larger will make these fun tasks appear more often.

Another technique is to place a special reward at the end of a list of tasks for a large project. If the project is set to “complete subtasks in order”, the reward will appear on your To Do List after you have checked off the last item in your project.