Reminders

Life Balance now includes a pop-up reminder window for your most important scheduled tasks. This is a very powerful new feature that can help you keep up with urgent tasks without losing track of what matters most. In Life Balance you only need to configure your reminder settings once and Life Balance will take care of the rest. Reminders even appear when Life Balance isn't running!

Other software applications associate an alarm with a single task. This often results in frequent interruptions. Alarms can become just another distraction. When there are too many alarms, you will tune them out. Because Life Balance is often used by busy, creative people with many hundreds of tasks, trying to set an alarm for each task would also be counterproductive. Life Balance does not use alarms in the typical way. Life Balance provides a rule based system where you can set preferences about what kinds of tasks are worth an interruption, and when and how to interrupt you. To differentiate from the normal notion of software alarms, Life Balance uses the term "Reminders."

Using Reminders

In Life Balance "Reminders" are a group of tasks that are displayed periodically in their own panel. The tasks displayed match your selection criteria.

Rather than setting manual alarms on particular events, Life Balance lets you choose general settings about what kind of events you'd like to be reminded of, and then applies those settings to all of the scheduled tasks in your Life Balance document. Because Life Balance uses the information that you've already entered into your outline to display reminders, using the new reminder system is effortless — just open your existing Life Balance document, and you can start using reminders right away.

The reminder window displays all the tasks that have (or will have) a sufficiently high priority in a specified window of opportunity. This window of opportunity looks backward for tasks that you might have just missed, and forward for tasks that are coming up soon. If there are high priority tasks within this window of time, Life Balance will open a reminder window with the tasks listed in chronological order, and will optionally play a sound as well. To the right of each task, the reminder window displays the scheduled time of the task, its place, and a colored bar indicating the task's overall priority. The color of the bar matches the color for the section of the outline. You can check off completed tasks directly from the reminder window.

Background Reminders

Life Balance can even display the reminder window when Life Balance isn't running! Just open your document in Life Balance and make sure that the Open Automatically item in the File menu is checked.

Tip: Background reminders can make it a little trickier when it comes time to upgrade Life Balance, because the reminders are running in the background all the time. Rather than trying to replace an old copy of Life Balance with a new one, move the old one to the trash first. Once you launch the new version of Life Balance, the old version will stop running and you can empty the trash.

Adjusting Reminder Settings

To control the Reminders panel, choose, "Reminder Settings..." in the File menu of Life Balance. Using Reminders in Life Balance is completely optional. The check box labelled "Remind me of scheduled tasks" at the top of the sheet, will turn the display of the Reminders panel on or off. When you set your Life Balance document to "Open Automatically" in the File menu option, you will get reminders for that file even when you have quit out of Life Balance if you have Reminders turned on.

The Reminder Settings panel is divided into three sections, "Timing," "Filters," and "Notifications." "Timing" tells Life Balance how big the window of opportunity should be in terms of how far ahead to look for upcoming events, and how far backward to look to help you catch up on scheduled tasks. Timing is also used to tell Life Balance how often you want to be interrupted to be sure that you are aware of the tasks that match your other selection criteria. Since Life Balance displays all the reminders at the same time in a single display panel, you will not get interrupted, by Life Balance, any more often than you want to be.

"Filters" in the Reminder Settings panel allows you to say how important a task needs to be in order to be worth being included in the Reminders panel. You can also choose to only be reminded of tasks for a particular Life Balance place.

"Notifications" helps Life Balance be even more polite about interruptions. You can control if sounds should play at all when the reminder panel appears. You can control how often sounds are played. You can also prevent sounds from playing while you are sleeping or in a meeting.

You can also change to a preferred sound other than the system sounds. To customize your sounds, you can put an .mp3 or .aiff file in the folder "Library/Sounds" in your home folder. The Library folder is created for you by the Mac OS. The "Sounds" folder may not exist, but if you create a folder with that name, Life Balance will be able to find it and use it. Any file with a sound format recognized by the Cocoa sound manager will work. Songs that are copy protected will not work.

When you open a document in Life Balance 5.3 (8), reminders are disabled by default. You can enable reminders on a file and adjust these settings by choosing Reminder Settings... from the File menu:

This brings up the reminder settings sheet for the current document:

Window of Time

How far into the past to look for missed events, and how far in the future to look for upcoming events. The lead time of future events is taken into account, so you may occasionally see events that are due after this window of time, but need to be started earlier.

Frequency

How often the reminder window should be redisplayed.

Priority

The minimum overall priority a task must have for you to be reminded of it. Dragging the slider left shows more reminders. Dragging it right shows fewer reminders.

Place

Only displays reminders for tasks assigned to the given place. Choosing “All places” displays all reminders regardless of place. Included places are also considered, so if you want to display reminders for several different places, you can create a special place that includes those other places and select it here.

Sound

Plays a sound when the reminder window appears, to alert you in case you're not at your computer. The sound will play repeatedly until you close the reminder window or press the Mute button. You can choose from the standard Macintosh alert sounds, or a custom sound placed in the ~/Library/Sounds folder. (Protected music from the iTunes Music Store does not work.)

Strategies for using Life Balance Reminders

As a general rule, the methodology for Life Balance emphasizes overall priority of your tasks rather than their urgency. We recommend that you continue to use the Life Balance to do list as your primary means of deciding what to work on next. Otherwise you may find yourself in “firefighting” mode where less important tasks distract you from your long-term goals.

However there are times when you don't want an urgent task to slip through the cracks when you are busy. There are also times when you may need to catch up before will be able to keep up with an overwhelming number of scheduled tasks. This is especially true if you already have a large outline and are using reminders for the first time.

To make use of the new Life Balance reminder system, you may find it helpful at first to approach it in the following way.

1. First set your window of time so that you look back over the past 12 months. Set the priority to be “Essential”. Complete any tasks you may have missed, and check off any completed tasks that you forgot to check off. If there are past due tasks that you have no intention of completing, delete them or lower their importance.
2. Once you have worked through the oldest tasks, gradually move the window of opportunity to be shorter until you are caught up on the most important of your scheduled tasks.
3. After you have worked through the most important tasks, you may want to set the window of time to look backward again, but with “rather” important tasks.

Continue in this way until you get to the point where you say “what's left is nothing I need to worry about”. Then set your window of time to be shorter and more forward looking and set the priority to what you want. Your goal should be to have just a few reminders pop up each day, and spend most of your time working from the Life Balance to-do list.