[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by petro

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.

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.

[scot]

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.

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by scot

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.

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.

[petro]

Originally Posted by brianogilvie

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 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.

[curt.clifton]

petro,

You'll probably be interested in this gigantic thread on priority.

[MEP]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

petro,

You'll probably be interested in this gigantic thread on priority.

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

[curt.clifton]

Originally Posted by MEP

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

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.

[dashard]

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.
"You're our only hope." -- Princess Leia Organa

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

[Frosty Crunch]

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.

[Frosty Crunch]

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.