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The To Do List

Life Balance provides a dynamically ordered To Do List driven by the importance of your goals, your desired allocation of time and effort, and feedback from what you get done each day. Life Balance sorts the list so that highest priority tasks are at the top, and it filters the list so that you only see the tasks that you can complete at the current time and location.

The order of tasks in the To Do List is primarily based on how important the tasks are, not when they are scheduled on your calendar. This helps you stay focused on long term goals that are important to you rather than responding to less important short term tasks. The Life Balance method of consistently keeping the most important tasks at the top of your list can help you overcome the common obstacles of distraction and procrastination, although you may initially find it surprising if you are used to other time management systems.

Updating your To Do List

Life Balance computes the overall priority of items in your To Do List based on a large number of factors, including the passage of time. For this reason, you may need to update your To Do List every so often even if nothing else has actively changed. If you make active changes, such as changing the importance of particular tasks and projects, changing the schedules and lead times assigned to tasks, and checking off tasks on your To Do List, you will also want to Update.

On the desktop, you can tell Life Balance to update automatically by unlocking the To Do List view. The advantage is that changes to Life Balance data will immediately affect the order of the To Do List view, and tasks that are checked off will be removed from your list. If you prefer to accumulate changes and see the check marks as you complete tasks, you can lock the To Do List and update it manually when it is convenient for you.

Note: Changes to places and the filters at the top of the To Do List take effect immediately. You do not need to update your To Do List when you change these settings.

When you update your To Do List, Life Balance will also see if it’s time to put any repeating tasks back on your To Do List. When Life Balance reschedules a repeating task it automatically unchecks the task. You will receive additional credit for completing the task each time you check it off.

Tip: If you find that a completed task reappears on your To Do List every time you update, it’s probably because the lead time for the task is too long. For a daily task, you probably want a lead time of just a few hours.

What appears on the To Do List

To view your entire To Do List, choose “All places” from the popup menu at the top of the To Do List, and make sure that the “Include closed places” checkbox is checked. If you have changed your Outline, or it has been a while since you updated your To Do List, then click on the Update button to recompute the priorities in your To Do List.

The To Do List only displays the currently active tasks from your outline. Even when you display your entire To Do List, there are certain tasks that will not be displayed:

Many long term projects have an open-ended nature, where you may not know all the steps necessary to complete the project when you begin. For example, to remodel a kitchen you might need to learn some things as you go along about kitchen design and the ways that a contractor will work on your house. Life Balance, unlike most formal project planning tools, has a simple mechanism to remind you to think about what comes next for the project. When you complete all the currently active subtasks for a project, the project itself will appear on your To Do List for evaluation. You can take this opportunity to brainstorm for ideas on what might further the project, decide what needs to be done next, and add more tasks. Once the project is done, having the project appear on your To Do List again gives you an opportunity to receive credit for completing the project.

Filtering the To Do List by Place and Time

Looking at your entire To Do List can sometimes be distracting, because many of the tasks on the list might need to happen somewhere else, or at a different time. It’s often helpful to focus on just the tasks that you can complete here and now. Life Balance provides two ways of filtering your To Do List: by your current location (place), and by when places are open and closed (hours).

To see a list of items that can be done in a specific place, choose that place from the Place popup menu at the top of the To Do List.If the location you have selected includes other places, then tasks from those places will also be included. For instance, if you have business at the bank, and the local mall includes a bank, when you select the local mall using the Places button, your banking errands will be shown along with other shopping and mall tasks.

Tasks that are assigned to the special place “Anywhere” will appear on all of your To Do Lists regardless of which place is selected. For example, you might have a task like “Read a book” assigned to Anywhere so that it will show up on all of your To Do Lists. If you would like to see a To Do List containing just tasks that can be done anywhere, you can select “Anywhere” from the popup menu just like any other place.

Note: Included places are not recursive. If the mall includes a bank, and the bank includes a phone, your telephone tasks will not appear on your To Do List for the mall. If you want your telephone tasks to appear on your mall To Do List, then you must include telephone directly in the included places list for the mall. See Included Places for details.

If you have assigned hours to the places in Life Balance, then you can choose to only display tasks for places that are currently open. For example, you can tell Life Balance that the post office is closed on Sunday, and the To Do List will hide tasks like “Buy stamps” until the post office opens the next day.

To display tasks regardless of whether places are open or closed, check the box next to “Include closed places”. To only show tasks for places that are currently open, uncheck this box.

Checking off Completed Tasks

To check off a completed task, simply click in the box beside it. The next time you update your To Do List, the task will be removed from the list. If your To Do List is unlocked so that it updates automatically, the task will disappear immediately.

When you check off a task, credit for completing that task will be awarded in the Actual pie chart in the Balance section, and the task will be listed in the accomplishments under the pie charts. The amount of credit is proportional to the setting of the effort slider for that task at the time it is checked off. Credit is cumulative, although it gradually fades over time. For repeating tasks, you get additional credit each time you complete the task. For more information, see Balancing Your Efforts.

If you accidentally check off a task, you can tap again to uncheck it. Life Balance will remove the credit from your actual pie chart and remove the task from your list of accomplishments. Note that when Life Balance automatically unchecks a repeating task, you do not lose any credit from your pie chart.

Whether or not they are visible in the To Do List, completed tasks will remain in the Outline and are available for editing, duplicating, rescheduling and unchecking until you delete or purge them.

Delaying the Completion of a Task

Although it is usually best to complete tasks as they appear on your To Do List, there are times when you may have a legitimate need to put off a task until a future date. Perhaps you're going on vacation, and your To Do List is showing you tasks that don't need to be done until you get back. Or maybe you're in the middle of handling a critical project, and need to put off some of your usual routine. In these cases, there are special commands in the Task menu that let you change the next scheduled time of a task.

All of these commands apply only to unchecked tasks. None of them mark the task as complete or affect the credit you've received for the task in the pie charts. They only reschedule the task to a different date.

Catch Up

Skips over any past occurrences of a task and schedules it for the future. A routine task will be rescheduled one time period in the future. (For instance, a routine task that happens every three days will be rescheduled for three days from now.) A repeating calendar event will be scheduled for its next future occurrence.

Skip

Skips over the currently scheduled occurrence of a task and moves forward one occurrence. Unlike the "Catch Up" command, the Skip command will only skip a single occurrence, so the task may still be scheduled in the past if you have missed more than once occurrence.

Skip gives you the opportunity to record credit for each occurrence as you go. For instance, you might use "Skip" if you want to track your exercise schedule at the gym. If you usually go to the gym each weekday but you missed class on Wednesday, you can skip over Wednesday and still give yourself credit for Thursday and Friday.

Postpone Until...

Allows you to reschedule any task to occur at a particular date and time. Tasks that happen "Once" or "By due date" will be rescheduled using a due date. Tasks that happen "Routinely" will be rescheduled for the specified date. Tasks that happen "By Calendar" will be moved from their current calendar date to the specified date.

When you choose one of these commands, a special icon may appear next to the task in place of the usual checkbox, if the To Do List is locked. The next time you update your To Do List, this icon will go away.

Temporary task icons
Catch up
Skip
Postpone Until...

Creating New Tasks from the To Do List

Sometimes it is convenient to create new tasks while you are looking at the To Do List. For instance, a project may appear on your To Do List when all of its subtasks have been completed, but if the project itself is not complete, you may want to enter new subtasks directly from the To Do List.

The New Task and New Subtask commands in the Edit menu work in the To Do List just like they do in the Outline. The new tasks are created relative to the selected task in the To Do List. If no task is selected, a new top-level task is created.

Tip: The top-level sections of your outline are identified in the To Do List by colors. In order to create a new task in a particular section of your outline, even if you are unsure of the exact placement, you can select a task of the correct color before creating a new task. You can review the Outline structure later.

If your To Do List is unlocked so that it updates automatically, then creating a new subtask will cause the selected task to be hidden, and the new subtask to appear in its place. The original task is still in the outline, but it is no longer displayed in the To Do List because it now has uncompleted subtasks.

Printing

You can print the to do list by choosing Print from the File menu and then selecting To Do List from the submenu. The to do list will be printed just as it currently appears on the screen with the current filter settings printed at the top of the first page.

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