I want Life Balance's simplicity from OmniFocus.
 

I'll be a devil's advocate here.

Feature request: simplify OmniFocus.

OmniFocus is too complex: Folders, Projects, Actions, Singletons, Action Groups -- I've been using the product for weeks and am still confused.

Enter [url]http://www.llamagraphics.com/[/url] -- this program presents a simple outline. There is only one kind of thing in the outline, a task. Task's become "projects" by virtue of having children. Children must be completed (either in parallel or sequentially) before the parent shows up in the task list. Any task can be repeating, or not. All tasks have a context (the default is "Any Context" so uncategorized tasks are easily spotted).

There! I just described Life Balance task/project structure. Doing the same for OmniFocus is impossible to do as succinctly.

In Life Balance I can have a project that has a single gating action followed by 3 parallel actions like so:

- My Project (set to sequentially execute)
-- Gating Action
-- Parallel Actions (set to execute in parallel)
--- Action1
--- Action2
--- Action3

I just tried to express the above in OmniFocus -- I can't figure out a way. Action groups seem to execute sequentially with no option to change it.

I realize OmniFocus is pre-beta and that my complaints may be about pre-ship warts that already have solutions planned. I'm just throwing it out there that it'll be great if all these different kinds of "things" you plan with in OmniFocus can be unified into something simpler to work with.

Why aren't you using LifeBalance? What weakness does it have that drives you to try OF?

[QUOTE=MattArmstrong;19928]
In Life Balance I can have a project that has a single gating action followed by 3 parallel actions like so:

- My Project (set to sequentially execute)
-- Gating Action
-- Parallel Actions (set to execute in parallel)
--- Action1
--- Action2
--- Action3

I just tried to express the above in OmniFocus -- I can't figure out a way. Action groups seem to execute sequentially with no option to change it.[/QUOTE]

In OF try right-clicking the action group and choosing "parallel". You might also be interested in these threads ([URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=4164&highlight=subproject"]1[/URL], [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=4004&highlight=subproject"]2[/URL], [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3604&highlight=subproject"]3[/URL], [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3624&highlight=subproject"]4[/URL]) discussing eliminating the distinction between projects and action groups. There are many other threads along similar lines. You aren't alone in wishing for a more regular structure, but neither are those who like the current variety of grouping mechanisms.

I'm somewhat surprised that you've been using the product for weeks and didn't come across how to make an action group parallel. What could be changed to make this more obvious? Is it that changing the parallel status of projects is "in your face" while for action groups it is unexpectedly more subtle? Or is it a problem with lack of documentation? Without a manual yet, I find that reading the forums regularly is very helpful to me in understanding how the product works and different ways of using it.

[QUOTE=MEP;19932]Why aren't you using LifeBalance? What weakness does it have that drives you to try OF?[/QUOTE]

I can't pretend to speak for the original poster, but I left Life Balance because I got sick of using an interface on my Mac that was designed for the screen of a Palm PDA. It's a great program for keeping track of what I have to do, but a lousy program for entering data efficiently.

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;19940]In OF try right-clicking the action group and choosing "parallel". You might also be interested in these threads ([URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=4164&highlight=subproject"]1[/URL], [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=4004&highlight=subproject"]2[/URL], [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3604&highlight=subproject"]3[/URL], [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3624&highlight=subproject"]4[/URL]) discussing eliminating the distinction between projects and action groups. There are many other threads along similar lines. You aren't alone in wishing for a more regular structure, but neither are those who like the current variety of grouping mechanisms.

I'm somewhat surprised that you've been using the product for weeks and didn't come across how to make an action group parallel. What could be changed to make this more obvious? Is it that changing the parallel status of projects is "in your face" while for action groups it is unexpectedly more subtle? Or is it a problem with lack of documentation? Without a manual yet, I find that reading the forums regularly is very helpful to me in understanding how the product works and different ways of using it.[/QUOTE]

Sounds like action groups are a little "half baked" at the moment (and maybe singleton tasks too) -- i.e. sources of confusion for many. My hope is that this "variety of grouping mechanisms" could be unified into attributes of just one or two as they are not that different from each other, but I'm sure there are many tricky issues, and there is an art to knowing when to ship version 1.0.

Needless to say, my take on programs like this is that the manual should be unnecessary, so I'd say this is not a documentation problem.

As for not discovering parallel/non-parallel under the action group right mouse button menu -- my MacBook has one mouse button. My original 128k Mac had one mouse button. Gosh darnit, Mac programs shouldn't require you to "option click" on stuff to find out if they do anything interesting. ;-) I do appreciate your pointing it out!

As for not using Life Balance any longer, my answer is similar to Brian's. The simplicity of the outline structure is elegant but the desktop version has a simplistic UI that makes it hard to do things like weekly reviews or manage larger outlines. I stopped carrying a PDA, so the product lost its luster.

[QUOTE=MattArmstrong;19947]Sounds like action groups are a little "half baked" at the moment (and maybe singleton tasks too) -- i.e. sources of confusion for many. My hope is that this "variety of grouping mechanisms" could be unified into attributes of just one or two as they are not that different from each other, but I'm sure there are many tricky issues, and there is an art to knowing when to ship version 1.0.[/quote]

I agree that action groups at the moment are a little wonky, but I'm willing to be forgiving at the moment because it is still an alpha. I'm starting to warm to the notion of action groups as opposed to sub-projects on a philosophical level, but I think the UI of OF at the moment is confusing in how it deals with action groups (the fact that I can't find any text anywhere in the application itself that actually says "action group" is the first problem). There's nothing to really indicate to the user what an action group is or how to interact with it. At the very least, I'd like to see the little parallel/sequential button from projects show up for action groups so new users don't have to "discover" the right-click menu to set this attribute. The problem is, where do you put it on a line that's already cluttered with all of the normal action attributes?

And why are there no "action group" specific settings in any of the inspectors? This is the most glaring issue because it's very easy to assume that an action group is a sub-project and try to edit the project attributes in the inspector while selecting the action group which will, of course, not do what you would expect it to do.

[quote]My original 128k Mac had one mouse button. Gosh darnit, Mac programs shouldn't require you to "option click" on stuff to find out if they do anything interesting. ;-) I do appreciate your pointing it out![/quote]

Don't get me started on the one-button mouse debate. Apple's original human factors team dramatically underestimated the average user's ability to adapt to two buttons, and they continue to make the same mistake in the face of a mountain of human interaction studies that contradict the Apple party line. This is not good design anymore, it's just a blind stubborn refusal to change.

What I don't get is why current Apple laptops still ship with only one button when Apple now ships "two-button" (or crappy hateful imitations of two-button) mice, Apple-written software makes generous use of right-click context menus, and the Mac OS has supported multiple buttons for almost two decades. For over a decade now, Apple has made great strides forward in the design of their systems by ignoring the needs of legacy systems. (remember the first floppy-less iMac? or having to buy a USB printer because they dumped parallel ports?). It seems so out of place for Apple to be sticking to their guns on the one issue that everyone seems to agree on -- that multi-button mice are more useful than one-button mice and it's really not as hard as we once thought it was for new users to figure out how to use them.

[quote]As for not using Life Balance any longer, my answer is similar to Brian's. The simplicity of the outline structure is elegant but the desktop version has a simplistic UI that makes it hard to do things like weekly reviews or manage larger outlines. I stopped carrying a PDA, so the product lost its luster.[/QUOTE]

Gotcha. Interface issues aside (and all UI issues may be temporary so long as we provide Omni with email feedback), I think the organizing structures of OF are actually pretty simple. Of course, I'm not using folders at all right now. I've got several hundred tasks in there and I'm perfectly content with projects and action groups. If all you use are projects and action groups, I think you can get the functional equivalent of what you describe with LifeBalance.

[quote=curt.clifton]I'm somewhat surprised that you've been using the product for weeks and didn't come across how to make an action group parallel. What could be changed to make this more obvious? Is it that changing the parallel status of projects is "in your face" while for action groups it is unexpectedly more subtle? Or is it a problem with lack of documentation? Without a manual yet, I find that reading the forums regularly is very helpful to me in understanding how the product works and different ways of using it.[/quote]

A general rule of thumb with user interface design is this: Never put anything into a context (right-click) menu that can't be discovered outside of the context menu. Right click menus are convenience features that can make certain frequently performed tasks easier (read: faster) to get to, but they should never ever be the sole place to access any feature. Users should never be expected to have to "scrub" every interface element of a new application just to discover the hidden features that lie in tooltips or within context menus. OF really should provide a more visible UI element (or at the very least, a main menu item) to change the parallel/sequential state of action groups.

But again, I'm fairly forgiving at this point because it's still an alpha.

I thought you could set the parallel state of action groups in the inspector, but it seems the the inspector is working on the parent project. I've filed a bug for that issue.

We also have some planned changes for Action Groups that will be coming down the pipe.

do tell
 

[QUOTE=xmas;19972]I thought you could set the parallel state of action groups in the inspector, but it seems the the inspector is working on the parent project. I've filed a bug for that issue.[/QUOTE]

There is no inspector for the "Action Group", as noted earlier.



[QUOTE=xmas;19972]We also have some planned changes for Action Groups that will be coming down the pipe.[/QUOTE]

Do tell, then, so we're not spinning our wheels trying to figure out how to make the current program work and then discussing on the boards how it doesn't.

[QUOTE=MEP;19971]What I don't get is why current Apple laptops still ship with only one button when Apple now ships "two-button" (or crappy hateful imitations of two-button) mice, Apple-written software makes generous use of right-click context menus, and the Mac OS has supported multiple buttons for almost two decades.[/QUOTE]

Apple's current laptops effectively have two buttons. It's just that one is virtual. On my MacBook Pro, if I place two fingers on the trackpad and click, I generate a right-click. It's become so habitual for me that I go nuts when I have to use my old PowerBook G4 and I need to control-click.

Because development stopped
 

[QUOTE=MEP;19932]Why aren't you using LifeBalance? What weakness does it have that drives you to try OF?[/QUOTE]

Why have I moved on from Life Balance? Development has effectively stopped. The company exists, but they seem to focus on new platform support (Windows Mobile, Vista, etc.) while there's been a huge laundry list of minor enhancements requested by existing users for years. Llamagraphics has taken to heavily censoring their user forum because there were so many complaints from customers. I waited 2 years in the hopes I'd get a few minor features. I gave up.

I moved on to MyLifeOrganized, which is a Windows app I run under Parallels. It's fantastic, but it's a Windows app. I'm constantly dealing with issues on cutting/pasting between OS's, Parallels being a memory/CPU hog, etc.

If I could have some basic functionality that Life Balance and MLO (MyLifeOrganized) has, but on the Mac platform, I'd be set. Hence why I'm investing a lot of time in to OF.

So the main things I want:

- An easy hierarchy - why should i have to worry if it's a project or task list or task? Why can't OF just figure this out? Just allow me to create a hierarchy and nest things within each other

- Priority to my hierarchy. Some tasks and projects are more important in my life. Lt the important or time critical things float to the top of my to do list


Remember the idea of a life/task managing application is to GTD. Not that I'm a strict follower of GTD, but I have found that OF takes a lot more of a learning curve than Life Balance or MLO to setup, and I spend more time on just organizing my tasks.

But the UI features are great!

[QUOTE=petro;20304]Remember the idea of a life/task managing application is to GTD. Not that I'm a strict follower of GTD, but I have found that OF takes a lot more of a learning curve than Life Balance or MLO to setup, and I spend more time on just organizing my tasks.[/QUOTE]

Maybe you're overplanning? From one standpoint, it can be liberating to brainstorm everything you have to do to move a project to completion, but from another standpoint, that might be overkill. If you have a next action for each project, and you regularly review your project list (once a week, at least), you might not need much more. OF has a lot of features--and no manual--but you can ignore many of them if you don't need them.

I myself am constantly trying to resist the urge to sharpen my tools (play with software) instead of actually getting work done. Tools do need sharpening, but not beyond the point of diminishing returns.

I want to be the Devil's enemy by saying I just downloaded life balance and it's ugly. I can't even get started in it. Looks ugly and complicated to me.

[QUOTE=scot;20369]I want to be the Devil's enemy by saying I just downloaded life balance and it's ugly. I can't even get started in it. Looks ugly and complicated to me.[/QUOTE]

It began life as a Palm application, and its interface on the Mac is still based largely on the Palm interface. That explains all the tabs and discrete chunks of space in the user interface. Had Llamagraphics redone the UI to make it more suitable to a computer screen, with columns, and added the ability to select and modify more than one item at a time, they might have had the killer GTD app.

[QUOTE=brianogilvie;20331]Maybe you're overplanning? From one standpoint, it can be liberating to brainstorm everything you have to do to move a project to completion, but from another standpoint, that might be overkill. If you have a next action for each project, and you regularly review your project list (once a week, at least), you might not need much more. OF has a lot of features--and no manual--but you can ignore many of them if you don't need them.

I myself am constantly trying to resist the urge to sharpen my tools (play with software) instead of actually getting work done. Tools do need sharpening, but not beyond the point of diminishing returns.[/QUOTE]

I see your point, but this is where I don't think the theory of GTD suits me well, and I use some concepts from other people's time/life management suggestions. I agree I should spend less time using the tool, hence why I want to be able to pre-set priorities.

I want to setup the goals in my life that are important to me. I want an application like OF to help me achieve the goals in my life. Some things are more important to me. For a simple example, going to the doctor is always more important to me than doing the laundry.

I hope OF won't just be a strict implementation of GTD to the point of not having enough flexibility to meet various people's needs. I think priority is a very valuable feature. It allows me to setup what projects are more important, thus they float to the top of the list. Otherwise I spend my time looking through a huge list of projects, and getting overwhelmed all the time trying to decide what to do. I want to be able to setup my goals up front, otherwise I will always choose the easy task, but not the task most important to obtaining the goals in my life.

petro,

You'll probably be interested in [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3836&highlight=priority"]this gigantic thread on priority[/URL].

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;20383]petro,

You'll probably be interested in [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3836&highlight=priority"]this gigantic thread on priority[/URL].[/QUOTE]

Oi! Don't dredge up that monster again. Did we ever actually come to any consensus in that thing?

[QUOTE=MEP;20389]Oi! Don't dredge up that monster again. Did we ever actually come to any consensus in that thing?[/QUOTE]

Nope. I'm hoping to avoid a rehash of that thread here. It would be great if someone comes up with a unique perspective on priorities, but I think that ground's been pretty well covered.

I just need to add my $0.02 regarding LifeBalance: I am a user from back in 2002. It hasn't been updated in any meaningful way -- not even the simplest of multiple UI improvement requests -- since back then.

I will be the first to say that if they modernized it and focused on the usability of the app it would be the killer.

That said, they seem incapable of adopting a proactive (as opposed to defensive) posture -- see comments on heavily censored forums.

LifeBalance is dead. Long live LifeBalance.

Omni needs to step into the void.
[I][B]"You're our only hope."[/B] -- Princess Leia Organa[/I]

No. I'm not a Star Wars geek; it was a stream-of-consciousness thing.

Life Balance is Simple?!
 

I found Life Balance to be extremely complicated, in that to "tune" it so its artificial intelligence auto-ranking allgorithm made sense to you and got things in an order that you felt was rational, it took an enourmous amount of tweaking and study of how each of the settings affected the other settings.

P.S.: I never did get Life Balance to work right, so I'm only assuming that it's possible. It's sort of like Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics in that respect: you never seem to meet anyone who can actually speed read -- everyone who has attended the classes makes excuses that they themselves were lazy, but a friend-of-their-friend who wasn't can read at lightning speed.

[QUOTE=Frosty Crunch;21970]P.S.: I never did get Life Balance to work right, so I'm only assuming that it's possible. It's sort of like Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics in that respect: you never seem to meet anyone who can actually speed read -- everyone who has attended the classes makes excuses that they themselves were lazy, but a friend-of-their-friend who wasn't can read at lightning speed.[/QUOTE]

For what it's worth, I got Life Balance working like a charm for GTD. But the interface, designed for a 320 by 320 Palm screen, began to drive me batty. And I had to identify projects with a kludgy (p) prefix.

[QUOTE=brianogilvie;22007]For what it's worth, I got Life Balance working like a charm for GTD. But the interface, designed for a 320 by 320 Palm screen, began to drive me batty. And I had to identify projects with a kludgy (p) prefix.[/QUOTE]

Exactly my experience. I'm using LifeBalance now, but I'm marking Projects (as opposed to sub-projects or other tasks that require multiple steps within a Project) with a mid-dot character (Command-8). The dynamically prioritized list is very cool, although I want to be able to drag an item up or down the list and have LB calculate a new "importance" value for it that would put it at the right location.

It's UI is all-but-unusably poor, though. I've had every intention of writing a new UI for it pending the release of AppleScript support, which they were promising would be out Real Soon Now over two years ago. When Omni announced OmniPlan I though I was saved, but it quickly became clear that it would be very hard to make OP do what I wanted, 'cause what I wanted was, well, OmniFocus. :)

I'm not terribly familiar with LB, having looked at it a long time ago; the goal is to actively put in front of you stuff you "should" be doing (based on some set of priorities, artificial intelligence, etc.)?

[QUOTE=jasong;22090]I'm not terribly familiar with LB, having looked at it a long time ago; the goal is to actively put in front of you stuff you "should" be doing (based on some set of priorities, artificial intelligence, etc.)?[/QUOTE]

Basically, yes. There are two parts to what it does. The first is just set a priority value for a task or project (I will use 'project' here for LifeBalance to mean 'a task that has sub-tasks.') The scale is calibrated "none-not very-somewhat-rather-essential" which corresponds to a numeric value from 0.0 to 1.0. When assembling the "To Do" list, LB starts calculating an absolute importance for each task on the list by multiplying its importance by the importance of its parent, and its parent, and so on. So a task that's 'essential' (1.0) to a project that 'rather important' (0.75) to a project that's 'somewhat' important (0.5) would have a final importance for ranking of 1x.75x.5 = 0.375.

However, the top heirarchy of projects are special. Mine are (roughly) "Home Maintenance," "Work," "Fun," and "Self/Family." LB maintains a pie chart for the top level categories, which you can adjust to show how much time/effort you want to dedicate to the different parts of your life. So perhaps I want to put maybe 10% of my time into home maintenance stuff, and 30% into my family time, while keeping work from taking over my schedule. I adjust my pie chart to reflect my priorities like that.

When LB assembles the To Do list, it tracks how many items in each category have been checked off (you can set an "effort" slider for each task or project to indicate how big a chunk of time/effort each item represents). If I've been checking off too much Work stuff recently, then Work items are going to get pushed down the list; if I haven't gotten any of my home repair tasks done, they move upward, automatically gaining in priority based on their individual importance and the ratio of actually completed tasks in that top-level heirarchy to the desired weight of tasks.

Thus the name "LifeBalance." According to LB, I've been spending too much time on "Fun" things recently.

Unfortunately, the UI is a couple of orders of magnitude too tedious for me (yes, other people have said this, but I have a [I]particularly[/I] low threshold; my medication can attest to this), so a fair number of things get done without getting into LB, greatly compromising its value. Sigh.

Life Balance attempts to put the Stephen Covey touchy-feely I-should-hugging-my-daughter-instead-of-doing-work stuff into a task management system.

David Allen's GTD explicitly removes this stuff from consideration, on the theory that when you get your tasks out of your head and into your "buckets," your intuitition will take over and guide you to the right task at the right time, long term or short term, personal, spiritual, or business. He may be right and he may be wrong, and it may fit your style and it may not. But that's what GTD is.

OmniFocus is a GTD app. If you want Covey and his ilk, OmniFocus is not for you. There are Coveyesque apps out there like Life Balance.

(My Life Balance antipathy may be partly feuled by lingering annoyance at their refusal to refund my money when their creaky, never-updated, overpriced app wouldn't sync to my Palm despite two months of doing everything they suggested.)

[QUOTE=brianogilvie;19944]I can't pretend to speak for the original poster, but I left Life Balance because I got sick of using an interface on my Mac that was designed for the screen of a Palm PDA. It's a great program for keeping track of what I have to do, but a lousy program for entering data efficiently.[/QUOTE]

Ditto that.

Version 4.0 was released
 

They recently released version 4.0 FYI

I stopped using LifeBalance from the sheer strain it put on my wrists and forearms from the clunky user interface.

OmniFocus is a giant leap forward...

OmniFocus is turning into an elegant application.

Too simple... you hurt the user
Too complex... you confuse the user...

elegance is the combination of the two.

Not to mention OmniFocus is 100% mac. You can see it in the application design and everything they do.

I'm starting to make software decisions based on whether I can tell if the application is mac-centric. And most of the time... mac-centric will be better applications.

If you have a mac... put your trust in OmniFocus.

Life Balance 4.0
 

[QUOTE=danvtim;24317]They recently released version 4.0 FYI[/QUOTE]

I gave LB 4.0 a whirl for about 2 days. After it duplicated all my entries and made a mess of my iCal calendar I have given up on the application. Every time Life Balance is updated (which is rarely) there is are problems that should have been solved in beta or alpha. I had terrible problems with Life Balance in the move from 2.0 to 3.0 which was about half a century ago.

;-)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the finished OF and I'm slowly migrating away from LB to OF. There are quite a few things I don't get about OF but I'm learning.

Just saw the Life Balance has a new 4.0 release, which includes AppleScript.

[QUOTE=InAccuFacts;24434]Just saw the Life Balance has a new 4.0 release, which includes AppleScript.[/QUOTE]

You'll be creating applescripts to work around their user interface.

[QUOTE=SpiralOcean;24436]You'll be creating applescripts to work around their user interface.[/QUOTE]

Yes. I was disappointed that the UI still is based on a 160x160-pixel Palm screen, with all the tabs it entails.

[QUOTE=InAccuFacts;24434]Just saw the Life Balance has a new 4.0 release, which includes AppleScript.[/QUOTE]

I know this is a long shot as your post was years ago, but did you ever come up with an Applescript to to help the LB user interface?