At the very least, you should read the Introduction section of the manual. It explains the Life Balance philosophy, details some of its more unusual and interesting features, and gives some high-level suggestions for how to create your tasks and places.

Everything in its place
Before you enter your tasks, you need to give a bit of thought to your choice of places. The word "place" implies a physical location, but Life Balance isn't that restrictive. You can use situations as well.

The Advice Book suggests that as a place, you can use "anything that it would be useful for you to sort by in your Life Balance to do list". Some of my places include: Errands, Home, When I have privacy (which will include tasks like Plan for next week, and Write journal), and Workplaces.

Places can include other places. As Figure B shows, I've included Somerset Academy (where I teach) and Writing in my Workplaces.

FIGURE B


Including places in other places can be very useful. Roll over picture for a larger image.

If I am in a working mood while at home, I can ask Life Balance to show me all "Workplaces" tasks, and will get both school tasks and writing ones. If I am at school, Life Balance can show me only my "Somerset Academy" tasks. Again, a little careful thought in how you set up your places will save you a lot of time later. (New Year's Resolution Number 2: Plan ahead!)

One cautionary note--in one of my earlier attempts, I left a lot of tasks with a place of Anywhere. When I then filtered my task list by, say, my Workplaces, I also got all of those Anywhere tasks. While this does make sense, I suggest you only give a task a place of Anywhere if you truly can do that task anywhere at any time. A task like Deep Breath! might work here.

Entering tasks
A key part of entering a task is the Details section. This is where you set the importance of the task to its parent, and the level of effort it requires. Life Balance gives you credit on the Balance screen for achieving your tasks, with the amount of credit depending on the weight given to importance and effort, right back to the parent task.

In Figure C, you're setting the importance of the Revise and submit Life Balance article task.

FIGURE C


The Importance and Effort (not shown) sliders are continuous, allowing you to pick exactly how to set each task. Roll over picture for a larger image.

One thing that makes Life Balance so different is that you're not setting this task's priority against your other tasks. Instead, this is simply how important this task is to your life. Many tasks can have the same level of importance. Life Balance uses a task's importance (as well as the importance of the tasks above it) in determining how high up the task will appear on your To Do list.

You can also set a task's Effort (how hard it is for you to complete the task--more difficult tasks earn you more credit) and how it's scheduled (once, routinely, repeating, on a certain date, or on a certain date and added to your Date Book).

Once the tasks are entered
So, all of your tasks are now entered. Great! Now it's time to actually complete some of them. (New Year's Resolution Number 3: Stop procrastinating!)