Maybe you've set yourself a few goals for 2005--lose weight, be a better friend or family member, keep your house clean, make a million dollars. Maybe you want to set some goals, but have been unsuccessful many times before. And maybe you have so many goals that you don't even know where to start.

Life Balance can help you.

Life Balance from Llamagraphics, available for Palm OS, Windows, and Macintosh, is much more than a To Do list. The software asks you to think about your priorities in life, and then helps you decide what you should be doing right now, wherever you are at the moment.

Life Balance in a nutshell
First, you decide what your main goals are. These are your top-level tasks. Then, you decide on projects to help you meet each goal. For each project, you define the tasks that need to be done in order to complete the project. Figure A shows one of my main goals (Listen to myself) with several projects (Relax, Decide on taking tarot course, etc.), and one project (Journal regularly) with a sub-task of investigating journaling software for my Zire.

FIGURE A


The hierarchy of tasks in my Outline. Roll over picture for a larger image.

While entering your tasks into the Outline, you put them into "places" (more on this below), and set the relative importance of each task to your life as a whole. Life Balance then sorts your list of tasks, showing you the most important things for you to do right now. You can see the overall most important things to be doing, or the most important things based on where you are right now.

When you complete tasks, you check them off. In the Balance screen, Life Balance shows you how your top-level tasks are weighted (which tasks are the most important), then shows you where you're spending most of your time and effort. This allows you to decide whether you're using your time and energy effectively, or whether you need to change your focus in order to achieve your goals.

First things first or, Do as I say, not as I do
Without a doubt, the first thing to do is to read the Life Balance Advice Book. Available for free at the Llamagraphics Web site, the Advice Book gives substantial detail on how Life Balance works, how best to set up your tasks, and places to maximize what Life Balance can do for you. The Advice Book is even available in a number of e-book formats for reading directly on your Palm. I highly recommend it.

That being said, I didn't read it until I'd been using Life Balance for two weeks. This would explain why I ended up re-creating my tasks and places three times because they didn't end up making sense for me. (New Year's Resolution Number 1: Read the manual!)