Quote:
Originally Posted by jasong
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.)?
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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
particularly 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.