How it works
The Life Balance program has four components: Outline, To-Do List, Places, and Balance. The Outline shows you all your tasks in one place, as shown in Figure A. It's a formatted list with top-level items (your goals or tasks) and child items (the subtasks or steps you need to take to reach a goal). You can see everything at one time in the Outline view, or condense all child items to look at the big picture. From the Outline, you can access details for each task.

FIGURE A

In the Outline you set up all of your goals and tasks.

Details, details
The tabbed Details window in the Outline lets you set a priority for each task, as shown in Figure B; a specific, recurring, or occasional date for each task; and a place where the task can be done. When you set a date for a task, the date is posted into your Palm address book.

FIGURE B

The slider lets you set a priority for each task in the Details window.

The places
When you enter details for a task, one of your choices is Place. What Life Balance calls a place is really a situation. A place can be a physical place like the post office or the bank (you can even include the hours these places are open, as shown in Figure C). You're also encouraged to use places for situations, such as when I'm tired, when I'm with Betty, when I'm on the Web, etc.

FIGURE C

On your list of Places you can include the hours a place is open.

One place can include other places. Let's say that good health is one of your goals, and that exercising is a sub-goal you need to do to achieve this. You can exercise at the fitness center at work or at the health club that you belong to. In Life Balance, you can create a place called Workout, which includes the places health club and work. You're also able to include notes about each place, as shown in Figure D. That way when you're at work, Life Balance will remind you that one of the choices on your to-do list is working out. You might even create places (or situations) such as "when I'm tired" or "when I'm standing on line" and connect tasks to those Places.

FIGURE D

You can also include notes about each place in your list of places.

To-dos I can really do
Once I've told Life Balance what I need to get done and when and where I can get these tasks accomplished, I switch to the To-Do List. If I choose to show all, I get my entire to-do list sorted by priority and lead time. If I choose a certain place, Life Balance will filter the task list to show me only tasks that I can actually get done in the place that I am. This is also good for preplanning for the next day.

Balancing act
The Balance section shows you two pie charts, as shown in Figure E. The pie on the right is generated when you check off to-dos that you've completed. This shows you where you're actually spending your time. The pie on the left shows you the same main goals, but you can drag the pieces to represent what percentage of your time should be spent on it. If you spend 5% of your time on Home but think that this ought to be 15%, you drag the pie slice clockwise with your Palm stylus. Now your to-do list will be updated and Home tasks will be shown to you higher up on your to-do list.