Task Details

The Task Details panel lets you specify the attributes of a task, including how important the task is, where and when it needs to be done, and how much effort the task will take. You do not need to set all of these attributes for every task. Many of these attributes are inherited based on the structure of the outline, and others are only needed in special circumstances. The default values will tend to place the task higher in your To Do List so that you won’t lose track of it.

To open the Task Details panel, just select a task in the Outline, To Do List, or Balance panels. The task details for the selected task will appear in the upper-right of the window.

Assigning the Importance of a task

The importance slider is the first setting under the General tab of the Task Details. The importance of a task indicates how necessary this task is to completing the project that contains it in the Outline.

Drag the importance slider left to reduce the importance or right to increase it. If the project cannot be completed without finishing this task, then the importance slider should be set to “essential”, regardless of the importance of the project. If it is possible to complete the project without finishing this task, then set the slider to an appropriate lower value. Even though there are labels for particular positions on the slider, the range of values for the slider is continuous and you can set the importance to any position along the slider.

Setting the importance slider in Life Balance is different from setting a task priority in most to do list software. In most other programs, you set a priority manually by comparing a task to every other task in your to do list, usually with a limited set of possible values. In Life Balance, you only need to consider the importance of the task to achieving the goal. Changing the importance slider for a project with subtasks will change the position of those subtasks in the To Do List, even though the importance sliders in the subtasks do not change.

When you update your To Do List, the importance value is combined with the importance of a task's parents (and other factors) to come up with an overall calculated priority which controls the order of tasks in the To Do List view. Since the importance of the task's parents is automatically factored in, there's no need (in fact it's counter-productive) to try to set a task's overall priority using the importance slider. Just think about how important the task is to accomplishing the goal above it, and leave the rest to the software.

The importance of a task or project can be changed at any time. If a project has to be put on the back burner for a while, you may want to lower its importance rating temporarily and then raise it later.

If you set the slider all the way to the left to "None", that task and any subtasks will not appear on your To Do List. Use this for planning projects that you may have no intention of working on right now. When you are ready to tackle the project, simply raise the importance and the tasks will reappear the next time you update your To Do List. Most of the time the importance slider should be set to reflect some importance, even if it is very little.

Assigning Places to Tasks

When you enter a task or goal into the outline, you can specify where that task can be performed. You can display a list of your places by tapping on the popup arrow. Then select the appropriate place from your list.

If you prefer, you can write in the name of an existing place or enter the name of a new place. If you specify a new place, Life Balance will ask you if you want to add the place. If you create it, it will be added to the list and be available to you when you enter another task.

There is a special place in Life Balance called “Anywhere”. Tasks that are assigned to Anywhere will be displayed on all of your To Do Lists, regardless of which place is selected at the top of the To Do List panel. New top-level tasks are assigned to the place Anywhere when they are created.

When you create a new subtask, it is initially assigned to the same place as its parent task. When you are entering a group of related tasks, you can save time by setting a place for a project before you create its subtasks.

Specifying Dates, Times, and Schedules

If a task needs to happen according to a particular schedule, you can assign that schedule under the Time tab in the Task Details panel. There are four types of schedules that you can assign to a task using the “Happens” popup menu: Once, Routinely, By due date and By Calendar:

Once

Once is the default, a choice appropriate for the kind of activity which does not repeat. It will not come back of its own accord; purchasing a tent would be an example of this kind of task.

There is one exception to this rule. If a project has a schedule, any subtasks that happen “Once” will inherit the schedule of the parent project. This makes it easy to assign an overall schedule to an entire project without having to assign a schedule to each task. You can assign a different schedule to a subtask if you need to override the overall project schedule for a particular task.

Routinely

Routinely allows you to set up repeating tasks that occur with some flexibility, that do not need to be scheduled for a particular date and time. You can tell Life Balance how often an item recurs by days, weeks, months or years. For example, you could use Routinely to loosely schedule tasks such as grocery shopping, calling your agent, changing the car’s oil, and doing laundry.

When you first set a task to happen routinely, Life Balance schedules it to happen immediately, which means that it will show up on your To Do List with full priority. Each time you check off a task that happens routinely, Life Balance will schedule the next occurrence of that task to happen relative to the date and time you checked off the task.

By due date

If something has to be done just once on a particular date and time, consider using By due date. Tasks that are scheduled by due date do not appear on your calendar, but their position on your To Do List will be governed by their due date and lead time. See Lead Time for more information.

When you choose By due date, Life Balance will fill in the current date and time. Tap on the displayed date or time to change them. Also be sure to select a lead time to indicate how much time you will need to prepare for the task.

By Calendar

If something has to be done on a particular date and time and you want it to appear in your calendar, choose By Calendar.

Once you have set a task to happen By Calendar, you can schedule that task either by clicking on the Add button or by dragging the proxy icon for the task to the calendar. Once the event is in the calendar, you can change the date, time, or repeat interval in the Event Details panel.

If you add an event to the calendar more than once, or schedule the event to repeat, the results are cumulative. Life Balance will track all occurrences of the event, and display the next scheduled occurrence in the Task Details. You can switch to a different occurrence using the “Next” popup menu if you need to skip an event.

If you need to skip an occurrence of a repeating calendar event without checking off the task, use the “Next” popup menu to select the next occurrence of the event that you still plan to complete.

Lead Time

If you choose Routinely, By due date, or By Calendar you should also enter the amount of lead time you will need to get ready for the event or task.

Lead Time prevents future tasks from appearing on your To Do list until you are ready to work on them. Tasks will not appear on your To Do List until twice the Lead Time before the deadline, and will gradually reach their maximum priority at one Lead Time before the deadline. If you need three days to prepare for an event, the Task will appear on your list six days before the deadline at a low priority, and gradually climb the list so that three days before the event it has its maximum priority. This does not necessarily mean that it will be at the very top of the list, only that it will attain the highest priority it can have relative to your other tasks and projects.

The Outline and the To Do List display due dates for scheduled tasks against a background whose color reflects the current lead time.

Green

The task is coming up Soon. The due date is between two and one lead times in the future. The task has not reached its full priority in the To Do List.

Yellow

The due date for the task is less than one lead time away. The task has reached full priority in the To Do List, and working on the task Now is recommended.

Red

The due date has passed, the task is Overdue and remains at full priority.

Complete subtasks in order

There is a checkbox under the Time tab titled "Complete subtasks in order". Selecting this allows you to set up a sequence of tasks that must be completed in order. When you choose to complete subtasks in order, only the first uncompleted subtask (and its children) will be included in the Life Balance To Do List. Essentially, this allows you to break a project down into "stages" where each stage must be completed before the next stage can begin.

The restriction that subtasks must be completed in order only extends down one level in the outline, so if the stages of your project are broken down into even smaller tasks, Life Balance assumes that these tasks may be completed in any order. For instance:

• Project A (Complete subtasks in order)
  • Stage 1
  • Stage 2
    • Task A
    • Task B
  • Stage 3

In this outline, Stage 1 must be completed first. Then Task A and Task B must be completed, but the order doesn't matter and they will both appear on the To Do List at the same time. When both Task A and Task B are completed, Stage 2 will appear on the To Do List and can immediately be checked off. Then Stage 3 will appear.

Effort

Effort is an abstract term that can be used to apply to time spent, task complexity, or even task stressfulness. In the Balance section of Life Balance, in the Actual pie chart, you are awarded credit for the effort or energy that you bring to the top-level goals that are important in your Life. The Balance section shows where your time and energy are being spent, and helps you to balance those efforts by adjusting your to do list to match your actual pie chart to the desired pie chart.

Generally it is a good practice to break your goals down into what feel like manageable tasks. This is certainly less overwhelming for tackling long-range plans, and if you do this consistently, you may not need to adjust the Effort slider at all.

There are circumstances where you may nevertheless find that some tasks require more or less effort than others and times when you may want to adjust how tasks get credited to your Balance section pie charts.

You may simply want to get higher credit for a task that takes more time to accomplish, but time is not always a good measure of effort. Sometimes you may want to get extra credit for completing an especially difficult or stressful task even if it doesn’t take very long.

When you create a new task, it will default to having the same amount of effort assigned that its parent task has. (This is similar to the way that tasks inherit places from their parents.) This way, you can create an item called "Buy groceries" with a very small amount of credit, and each item you add to the grocery list and check off will only give you a small amount of credit. This effectively allows you to have different credit defaults for different parts of your outline.

You can adjust the effort slider lower, for frequent, small tasks that would otherwise skew the effort awarded in the Actual pie chart too high for that top-level goal.

Notes

Task notes are available for editing whenever the Task Details are visible. Click on the Note tab and enter your text. You can also drag-and-drop text from other applications like email.

On the iPhone, notes appear below the task description. You can add a note to a task when you are in edit mode for the Task Details.

Tasks, places, and calendar events all have separate notes.

In the Outline, To Do List, and Balance panels, tasks with notes are displayed with an icon that looks like a sheet of paper. Clicking on this icon will take you directly to the note field in the task details.

When you HotSync® to a Palm handheld, only the first 2,000 characters of your note are copied to the handheld. As long as you don’t edit the note on the handheld, the desktop will preserve the entire note. If you edit the note on the handheld, the edited note will replace the desktop note at the next HotSync.

Using Navigation Icons

The task details panel contains four icons that you can use as shortcuts to navigate through the software.

Task proxy icon

You can drag the task proxy icon into the outline to move the selected task to a different section of the outline. This is especially useful when moving a task to part of the outline that is scrolled off the screen. You can select the task you want to move, scroll the outline to the new position, and then drag the task’s proxy icon to the new location.

You can also drag a task’s proxy icon to the calendar in order to create a new calendar event for the task. The event details will be displayed so that you can set times, repeating patterns, and notes for the new event. If the task is already has events on the calendar, dragging the proxy icon to the calendar again will create an additional event.

If you need to locate the selected task in the Outline, clicking on the proxy icon will expand and scroll the outline so that the selected task is visible.

Parent task icon

Clicking on this icon from the task details panel will open the details panel for the parent task.

For example, if you have a task “Oil change” which contributes to the project “Car Maintenance,” you can click on this navigation icon and it will go directly to the task details for “Car maintenance.”

Place icon

Clicking on this icon will open the details panel for the place that is assigned to the task. You can use this to edit the list of included places, the hours, or the notes for the assigned place.

Calendar event icon

When a task has an associated event scheduled on the calendar, clicking on this icon will open the details panel for that event.