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 preferences .
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.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Most of the keyboard shortcuts in Life Balance are visible next to the commands in the menus, but there are some special keyboard shortcuts available in the outline, to do list and accomplishments that are less obvious. The shortcuts that are available depend on whether you are editing text (Edit Mode) or have an entire task selected (Select Mode).
| Edit Mode | Select Mode | |
|---|---|---|
| Select previous | Control up arrow | Control up arrow Up arrow |
| Select next | Control down arrow | Control down arrow Down arrow |
| Move up | Control Alt up arrow | Control Alt up arrow |
| Move down | Control Alt down arrow | Control Alt down arrow |
| Move left | Control Alt left arrow | Control Alt left arrow |
| Move right | Control Alt right arrow | Control Alt right arrow |
| Expand | Control + | Control + + (Plus) Keypad + |
| Collapse | Control - | Control - - (hyphen/minus) Keypad - |
| Switch mode | Return Keypad enter |
Return Keypad enter |
| Insert return | Control return Control keypad enter |
|
| New task | Shift return Shift keypad enter Control N |
Shift return Shift keypad enter Control N |
| New subtask | Control I | Control I |
| Delete task | Control Del | Del |