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I want Life Balance's simplicity from OmniFocus. Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frosty Crunch View Post
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.
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:
Originally Posted by brianogilvie View Post
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.
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:
Originally Posted by jasong View Post
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.)?
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.
 
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:
Originally Posted by brianogilvie View Post
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.
Ditto that.
 
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.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by danvtim View Post
They recently released version 4.0 FYI
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.
 
 


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