As you finish one of your to-dos, Life Balance gives you credit on your pie chart. So that you don't rest on your laurels, the program can be told how long to keep on giving you credit for a completed task. If you took your son to a little league game two weeks ago, that was a great thing to do, but it's probably time for another parent-son outing.

FIGURE E

The Balance pie charts let you see how close you're coming to your stated goals.

Future Development
Although I really like Life Balance, it needs a desktop application in order to be really useful to me. I just can't see myself doing serious life planning in Graffiti. The folks at Llamagraphics told me they're committed to a Mac and Windows desktop application. This will also make Life Balance useful to those people who don't use Palm devices.

In addition, and in some ways more pressing, the ability to export my to-do lists to the Memo Pad and thus be able to print them is crucial. I'd also like to see the ability to export to HTML. Beyond this, groupware is a logical development. A groupware version of Life Balance with the ability to share certain parts of a task list, and not others, could be a killer business application.

Bob Freud is an active PalmPilot enthusiast and the Coordinator for the Center for Instructional Technology at Bergen Community College. He can be reached via email at rfreud@mailhost.bergen.cc.nj.us.