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 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.

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 preferences 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 preferences for more information.

If the Desired pie slices get too small for you to tap on, there is a menu item in the Options menu named "Reset pie slices" that will set the pie slices back to being evenly divided.

Note: In the mobile edition of Life Balance, if you have more than twenty top-level items in your outline, only the first twenty will be displayed in the pie charts.

A Pat On the Back: Your Accomplishments

Below the two pie charts is a list of your accomplishments. Initially, this list displays completed tasks from all sections of your outline. If you select a slice from one of the pie charts, then the list will only display completed tasks from the corresponding section of your outline. To deselect a slice, tap in the corner of the imaginary square surrounding the pie chart.

Note: Repeating tasks that were unchecked and rescheduled when you updated your To Do List will not be shown in your list of accomplishments. However, the credit that you previously received for completing these tasks will still be stored in your Actual pie chart.

Often with long term goals, tasks get added to the list as you go along, which can give you the sense that you are not gaining ground. If there are always the same number of tasks remaining to do, it is easy to get discouraged. Taking the time to review your accomplishments and to see the growing list of completed tasks can help you recognize that you are steadily making progress toward a long term goal.

If you are using Life Balance to help you balance your work and leisure time, or to give yourself rewards for completing long projects, reviewing your accomplishments list may also be a good time to consider shifting focus to other areas of your life. Long-term goals may contain intermediate milestones that deserve recognition, and when you see these milestones in your list of accomplishments you may want to actively choose from reward or leisure tasks that recognize your hard work. See Planning for Rewards for ideas on how to do this effectively.

Clearing the Decks: Purge

When you are using the mobile edition of Life Balance, old completed tasks can take up valuable memory and slow down your handheld. Once you are done savoring your accomplishments, you may want to reclaim that memory and make room for new goals, ideas and plans. You can delete items by hand from the outline, or you can use the Purge command to locate and delete old completed tasks automatically.

Note: Tasks that happen routinely and tasks associated with repeating calendar events are not deleted by the Purge command, unless the event has an end date and all ocurrences have been completed. If you purge, and tasks are not deleted that you thought would be cleared out, check the projects and goals at a higher level in the outline to see if they are scheduled to repeat in the future.

When you purge tasks, the accumulated credit for each task is transferred to its parent task in the outline. So even though the purged tasks will no longer appear in the list of completed tasks at the bottom of the Balance section, the credit for these tasks will still appear in the Actual pie chart.

To clean out your old data, go to the Balance section and choose Purge from the Options menu. If you like, change the number of days beyond which checked-off items will be deleted. Tap Purge to complete the transaction.

When doing a purge, Life Balance will retain any tasks linked to Pimlico DateBk templates. This means that if you know that a task will happen repeatedly, but you're not certain of the exact schedule, you can use templates to schedule the task in an ad-hoc way without worrying about the task being purged from Life Balance.