Life Balancing Getting Things Done and Franklin/Covey2 February 2004 This probably sounds strange, coming so closely on the heels of my recent column detailing how I implemented Allen's system on my Palm via Slap, ShadowPlan an DateBk5. But as I've pointed out, mobile tech is a constantly changing, constantly evolving field, and if you don't keep trying new things, you'll never have anything better that what you have now. The pure Getting Things Done (GTD) system seems to have some weaknesses. The first one (and I hinted at this in my column on GTD) is that it tends to stress urgency over importance. If something needs to be done, there's no real difference in the system between one thing and the next. Allen says that the user should rely on intuition to pick what the real priority is out of the list. More often than not, I'll pick anything but "clean up the living room" out of my @Home context, even if I know that's what really needs doing the most. I may be "getting things done," but am I getting the right things done? Covey says that the difference between efficiency and effectiveness is doing things right versus doing the right things. The GTD system doesn't really enforce effectiveness. Part of the reason for that is that GTD also has no obvious connection to the user's core values. As expected in a "bottom up" approach, it's focused more on getting the daily minutae out of your mind so you can think about other things. This is great, but once you've got that under control, how do you know what to think about? And how do you know what's really most important to do at any given time? Finally, GTD is complex to set up and operate on a Palm. My implementation with Slap, Shadow, CanDo and DateBk5 is far simpler than others I've seen, but it's still a high-maintenance system. One of the quotes Allen seems to be fond of is from Albert Einstein: "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." I agree with this, and "dumbed down" applications drove me nuts on the Pocket PC, but for something to be fast enough to stand up under daily use with people shouting at you to get something-or-other finished, it has to be dead simple to use, and Shadow doesn't quite make that cut. That's not to say that the Franklin/Covey system of planning that I used before was any better, just different. Covey's "big rocks" system has its own flaws and weaknesses. For one, it's not context focused, so you're often reminded to do things when you can't possibly do anything about them. Two, it tends to let the smaller, lower-priority stuff fall through the cracks. How many people with Franklin Planners have had the same C priority stuff at the bottom of the list for weeks or months, with no progress on them at all? No, to be truly effective, I need a mixture of Allen's "bottom up" planning and Covey's "top down" visioning. And that's where Life Balance comes in. Life Balance is developed by the folks at LlamaGraphics, and they've been doing this for quite some time. The original version of Life Balance dates back to the Apple Newton, although they now have versions of the program for PalmOS, MacOS and Windows (no Pocket PC, sorry, although the Windows version is based on .NET, so it should be easily portable to Windows Mobile 2003 machines). Life Balance has an interesting philosophy. On the one hand it encourages you to do high level visioning and hierarchical planning, but on the other hand it's extremely context-focused and gives you simple, uncluttered lists of what really needs to be done. How does it do this? There are four main parts of the program, accessed via an icon bar at the top of the screen. The first is Outline. This is a pretty standard hierarchical planning system at first glance, allowing you to break large projects down into manageable steps. But the magic is in the details, and there are subtle nuances to Life Balance that make it different from anything else on the market. For each item in the outline, you can select a level of importance. This has nothing to do with due dates. Importance is not urgency. You select how important this item is to its parent, on a sliding scale ranging from Essential to Somewhat, all the way down to None. You don't have to worry about how important a task is relative to other tasks, just to the parent. Tasks are sorted against each other by sophisticated algorhythms that factor in relative and cumulative importance as well as urgency and context. But we'll get to that later. You also select the place for each task (it defaults to the place of the parent, so you should always set that first). Places are what Allen calls contexts, and they work to filter your list so that only tasks you can actually do here and now are shown. (We'll get to Places in due time.) LlamaGraphics suggests setting the top level items (TLIs) in the outline to be your major life goals, and to start each with a verb ("Earn a living"). I divert a bit from them here and instead use something that I picked up from Hyrum Smith, the inventor of the Franklin Planner. Since the importance for the TLIs is set relative to your life as a whole, I figure this is the best place to record your governing values. What are your values? Do you really know what they are? A lot of people don't, and up until recently, that included myself. We all feel them, on a subconscious level, but most of us have never really thought about them, much less codified them by writing them down. I've found a little exercise that makes figuring out what you really care about pretty easy. Imagine you, as you exist some undetermined number of years in the future. You are the ideal you. You have everything you've always wanted, and more to the point, you are everything you've always wanted to be. Now write down a series (as many as you can think of) of true statements about that version of you. For example, here are some of the ones I came up with for myself.
There are a few more, but that's the gist of them. Notice that each one is a positive statement, phrased in the present tense. These are my core values, the visions of my life that I'm committed to making real. I have each of my core values as my TLIs in Life Balance. I've set for each of them their relative importance to my life as a whole, and each project, task and subtask under them inherits that importance when it comes time to calculate what I should actually be doing at any given moment. Under each value, I have a number of projects that will bring my current existence closer to that of my value statement. Each of these is also stated as a successful outcome, so I know when the project is actually complete. Under my writing value, I have "Writing On Your Palm is the premier website for ebooks, writing and mobile technology." That one may be true already (or it may not), but I have to keep it true by putting out new columns and improving the site. I also have "I've written and published a monthly serial that has revolutionized the ebook industry by bringing the comics and television storytelling model to prose." This one is a long way from being done, since I haven't even written the first issue yet. But it's something I'm focused on achieving. Under each project, I have them broken out into major steps. Now here's where it starts to get tricky. According to Allen, I shouldn't have more than one or two next actions under each project. According to Smith/Covey, I should break each project down into as much detail as necessary to get a feel for the project, then assign priories and due dates to each. I split the difference here. I do break things down into finer granularity than Allen recommends, but I don't assign due dates unless absolutely necessary and I only worry about importance relative to the parent project. For most tasks, this remains at the default of "Essential" since the project can't be completed unless each task is done. Whether the project is essential to the governing value will determine the task's overall importance on the list later. Due dates can be handled in one of three ways. On each you can set a lead time for the task to give yourself time to get it done. Life Balance doesn't show the task until it's two lead times out, at which point a dated task has a green checkbox (undated "do whenever" tasks have white checkboxes). At one lead time, the checkbox turns yellow, and it turns red if it goes overdue. The first due date setting is a regular recurrance, X number of days after you check it off. This is great for things that have to be one on a regular basis, but not on any fixed schedule (clean cat box). I should also note that if a parent task (project) is set to repeat, the child tasks inherit its due date and regenerate when it does. The second due date setting is simply "by due date." This allows you to list things that are time-sensitive (urgent rather than important) but not repeating. These will slowly move up on the To Do List (see below) as the due date approaches, but their overall importance is still governed by the importance of their parent tasks (projects) and TLIs (governing values). The last date setting is "By Date Book." This allows you to create an appointment in the Date Book application and link it to the task. The task then inherits the schedule of the appointment, including hard repeat settings like "every other Tuesday" or "the fourth Thursday of every month." These are also useful even if you don't need a repeat setting if you find that you need to block out some time to ensure that you get something done. Each time you start Life Balance, it defaults to importing new items from the Palm To Do List into the outline as new TLIs. This gives you a way to easily get information out of applications like DiddleBug and Slap and into your outline. While Life Balance has a very nice drag-and-drop implementation, I've found that with a large outline the easiest way to move these new tasks/projects to their appropriate place is to select them and then use the Move menu item. This pops up a dialog box with the text of the item and a collapsed version of the outline. Drill down to where the task should go, then tap Okay. It's as simple as that. Okay, so that just about covers the Outline view. The next to look at is Places. As I mentioned before, Places is the Life Balance version of what Allen calls contexts. A place can be a physical place (home, work, car), it can be a "virtual" place where certain resources are available (phone, computer), or it can be a "place" in time (spare time, weekly review). How you set up your places is up to you, but Life Balance provides a great deal of flexibility in setting them up. First off, for each place on your list, you specify the hours that it's "open". This can be literal in the case of work hours, shopping at the mall, etc, or it can be more free form. I've seen people set up places like "weekend" that are open Saturday, Sunday and Friday night, but closed the rest of the week. The reason for specifying open times is to the To Do List can filter out tasks that can't be done right now. If you're awake at 3am and need something to do, you don't want to be reminded to go to the gym if it won't be open for three more hours. The second cool thing about places in Life Balance is that they're recursive. Places can hold other places. For example, I have a place set up for each room in my apartment, mostly for cleaning purposes. I also have a place called "Home" that includes:
If I set my context to "Home" in the To Do List, I'll see tasks for all of those contexts (basically, anything I can do while I'm home). If I want to focus on just one area (for example, just the stuff I can do while seated at my PC), I'll pick one of the sub-places. Places are the key to context-based task management. If you set them up right (and this will take a bit of experimentation to find the right contexts for you), you'll be able to achieve Allen's "mind like water" much more easily as you'll be able to see exactly what you need to do when and where you need to do it, and nothing else to distract you from your tasks. Allen also talks about setting up Agendas, basically lists of things to address with people when you're with them. I've found that a great way to do this in Life Balance is to make each item a task and create "places" for each person. I have places set in Life Balance for each of my managers and each of my employees, all included as part of the "Work" place. Anything that has either been delegated or that I need to discuss goes in the "place" of who I need to work with to make progress on that task. So far this works pretty well, but it might be unwieldy if you have more than a dozen or so people that you delegate to or correspond with frequently. Okay, you've set up your outline (what you want to do with your life) and your list of places (where and when you do stuff). How do you know what to do in this moment? The Life Balance To Do List. Life Balance's To Do List looks a little weird if you're used to the Palm or Franklin lists. There are no obvious priorities or due dates. On the left you have a drop down for Place, or context, and on the right you can toggle between all hours or filter to just the places that are open. Under those, you have a simple list of tasks with checkboxes, and an "Update" button at the bottom. This screen is at once the simplest and most complex part of the program. For the user, this is easy. Select where and when you are, then hit Update. You'll see the list change to things you can do here and now, and sorted by overall importance to your life. Sometimes the results are surprising, as you often see tasks up near the top of the list that you wouldn't have put there yourself. But there's a method to the madness. Each task is weighted based on cascading importance of its parents, nearness of due date (if any) and additional modifications from the Balance screen (see below). The calculations to sort the To Do List are very complicated, but the end result is a list that shows you in black and white what's really most important for you to do right now. There's nothing to say you can't skip the first five things on the list and do something easy, but unlike the GTD system, you know that those five things will have a greater long term positive impact on your life than task number six. Also note that while urgency is factored into the calculations, it's not an overruling factor. Quite often I'll see tasks with red checkboxes (clearly overdue) that didn't even make it on to the first page of items. They may be overdue, but they're not relatively more important than other things on the list that may not have due dates at all. Life Balance is focused on helping you make substantial progress and improvement in your life, not just put out fires. Unlike the Palm To Do List, items don't necessarily disappear from this list as soon as they're checked off. Checked items only disappear when you hit "Update" again, and repeats will automatically reappear when they're two lead times out. I've grown to like this as it gives me a little energy boost to see what I've already accomplished, and it reminds me if I'm focusing on the easy stuff rather than the important things at the top of the list. Finally, after you've checked off a few things (actually several days worth of things), it's time to look at the Balance screen. Here you see two pie charts. The one on the left shows you how you want to divide your time among the TLIs (your governing values, remember?) in your outline. The pie chart on the right shows how you've actually been spending your time, based on tasks that you've checked off. Tapping on a pie wedge shows you the name of that TLI and the tasks that have recently been checked off under it. This is a nice "progress report", reinforcing that you are getting things done and making headway towards your goals. The primary purpose of this screen, though, is to help you balance those TLIs. Again the AI in Life Balance really shines here. You can adjust the size of the pie slices in the left-hand pie to favor some values over others, allowing you to emphasize areas that you may have been neglecting. Then, based on a preference you can set in the overall application, Life Balance can start "weighting" tasks from that TLI with more overall importance, moving them higher in the To Do List and encouraging you to pay more attention to them. Like many things in Life Balance, this feature can be set on a sliding scale from extreme, very noticeable weighting all the way down to none at all. None at all would be the "pure" Getting Things Done way to go, but I like the idea that my To Do List knows what's really important to me and can auto-prioritize accordingly. If I've been slacking off in one area of my life, my Palm now calls this to my attention and if I decide I want to focus more on that until it gets more in line with where I really want to be, my Palm can make those things more prominent. Now, I say "my Palm," and Life Balance does work very well as a Palm-only application. But for most users, the fact that Life Balance comes as a Windows (or Mac) program as well and syncs with the handheld will make it even easier to use. The desktop version of Life Balance does everything the handheld version does, plus shows your dated items on a calendar view. It's also generally more convenient to do big data moves or massive data entry/brainstorming on the PC with a full keyboard/mouse and a large monitor. While I can do my weekly review on my Palm, I try to do this on the desktop because I can see more of a project on screen (which helps in keeping "the big picture" in mind and discourages overcommitting). I also find that doing the weekly review on the desktop helps me ensure I do a weekly review; sitting down and doing this at my desk helps instill a sense of "ritual" that makes doing a weekly review harder to skip. The Palm version of Life Balance has another feature that makes it easier to interoperate with your desktop PC. You can configure Life Balance to export your tasks into the stock Palm To Do List. Life Balance places are mapped to To Do categories, and priorities will be set from 1 to 4 for active tasks, and 5 for tasks that haven't shown up on Life Balance's To Do List yet. While I don't use these exported tasks on the Palm (I prefer checking them off in Life Balance itself), I do check them off in Palm desktop when I'm working on my PC. Since I've taken to doing most of my writing in palmOne's 32k memos, this gives me quick and easy access to my tasks without also leaving Life Balance running on my ancient, memory-constrained PC. So what makes Life Balance the perfect meshing of Covey's First Things First methodology and Allen's Getting Things Done? GTD tends to stress urgency over importance, but Life Balance enforces a focus on importance, often showing things at the top of the list that may not have any urgency while moving foward a vital long-term goal. This importance-focus promotes greater effectiveness than the efficiency the GTD system fosters. It also creates an obvious connection between your core values and your tasks, so you know you're doing what really matters and not just putting out fires. Life Balance is also very easy to set up and maintain compared to mixing and matching an outliner, a task list and super-calendar application. The integration in Life Balance is tighter than any mix of other applications. Conversely, Life Balance's context focus means that you aren't reminded to do things when you can't do anything about them, as you would be in the Franklin Planner or Covey system. The only things you can see on your To Do List are things that you can do right here and now, things that will have a positive impact on your life. Things that you've been ignoring for too long will start to percolate their way up on your list, and if they're really important to you at all, you'll get them done. Life Balance lives up to its name. It's a great way to record everything in your life, decide what do about it and get it done while being confident that you're not only doing things right, you're doing the right things. If you want to make some serious progress in your life towards the things that really matter, you owe it to yourself to give this program the full thirty day trial. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |