Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 26 Feb 2004 09:29:37 GMT
I’ve finally settled on a set of Palm-based organization programs. As mentioned before, I’m using Life Balance for managing my to-do lists. It’s kind of an odd program, and it still needs some work, but the basic concept is wonderfully simple. You use its outline view to define goals (“earn a living,” “spend time with family and friends”) and then fill in details under the goals. For example, I have a number of ongoing and upcoming projects at work, plus infrastructure things like “fill out timesheet.” Each branch of this tree has an importance attached to it, so you can say things like “this sub-tree is very important to its parent” or “this sub-tree isn’t very important at all.” The cool part is that Life Balance can then take this outline and sort it into a simple linear to-do list, showing the most important things at the top. It’s not 100% perfect, but with a small bit of tuning, it’s usefully close. It knows how to handle deadlines, so tasks bubble up the list as the deadline gets closer, and it can handle recurring to-do items. Rather uniquely, it tries to balance the priorities of your different goals, so if you’re getting tons of items completed on your work list, it can bump up the priority of non-work items in an attempt to remind you to be a more balanced person, if that’s what you desire.
The story behind Life Balance is kind of interesting–apparently the author was a VAX sysadmin, and wrote the program in an attempt to regain control of her life while on-call for work. I can certainly sympathize. Apparently I’m not the only one–there have been several positive reviews of Life Balance released recently.
Life Balance runs on Windows and the Mac, as well as on the Palm. Each piece is licensed separately. It seems to sync well on the Mac. There are rumors of a PocketPC version appearing at some point.
For managing my calendar, I’ve replaced the Palm’s DateBook with Agendus. It’s a comprehensive calendar/to-do/contact-management app that is aimed more towards sales types then programmers, but it does a really nice job of displaying upcoming events. I used to lust after the PocketPC “Today” screen, but Agendus more then fills that gap with a zillion different ways to view calendar and to-do items. You can view days one at a time, one or two weeks at a time in a grid, list, or graphical free/busy block view, a month at a time, quarterly, view lists of upcoming events 1/2/7/14/30 days in the future, view isolated lists of to-do items or have them integrated into the calendar view, plus a few others that I’m missing. It supports small fonts at least on PalmOS 5 and Clies running PalmOS 4. I really like the way it looks, and the ability to use small fonts means that you can see a lot of detail on the screen at a time.
Plus, since Life Balance can sync its sorted to-do list with the Palm’s native to-do database, you can view Life Balance items with deadlines on Agendus’s calendar and mark them complete directly from Agendus. The two programs integrate beautifully together.
I’m happy with the two programs, but I have a couple things that I’d like to see improved, mostly in Life Balance. First and foremost, it really needs to be updated with the ability to use smaller fonts on the Palm. It’s hard to tell what’s going on in the outline view because the text is so big that you can only see a handful of lines at a time. Entertainingly, the Mac desktop version suffers from the same basic problem–it has so much window-dressing that it’s hard to see your whole outline at once. Both of these need to be fixed soon.
All in all, though, I’m happy with both programs and bought both of them.
Posted in Handheld and PDA | Tags agendus, clie, lifebalance, palm, pim | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 10 Feb 2004 11:09:35 GMT
As part of my current organization kick, I’ve been thinking about what I want in a portable computer (PDA, handheld computer, smartphone, tablet PC, whatever). I’m a geek and a bit of a gizmo freak, but I try to be at least a bit practical–do I really want a Linux-based PDA that’s going to need ongoing sysadmin work just to be usable?
My experience with the Windows-based Motorola MPx200 smartphone rammed home another point–an organizer that can’t sync reliably is useless.
Finally, playing with Life Balance and ReaderWare has demonstrated that organization applications with both a PDA and a desktop component can be more useful then either component would be on its own.
Three simple points that most of us already know, but they’re easy to forget when faced with gratuitously cool new hardware. In short, the purpose of computers is to run software, and the point of software is to give you access to information, and if your handheld can’t run your software, or it can’t access your information, then it’s really just a cool paperweight with a nice display.
Since I’m running OS X on my primary computer, it stands to reason that I’d be best-served by a handheld that syncs with the Mac, and has as many applications as possible that can sync application-specific data between the Mac and some PDA application. And, since I want to run Life Balance, I’d be best served by a handheld that can actually run it. In every case, the best choice is some flavor of Palm, either a traditional one from PalmOne, a Sony Clie, or a PalmOS-based phone.
Now that I’ve finally answered the question “what do I want a PDA for?” I can stop looking at PocketPC handhelds, Zauruses, and whatever else is out there, because they aren’t going to do what I want them to do. It’s a nice realization, and I guess I have Motorola to thank for that, mostly. Who knows where I’d be now if they could build a battery that worked :-).
Now, if only PalmOS 5 didn’t suck so bad…
Posted in Handheld and PDA | Tags lifebalance, macosx, pda, pim, sync | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 05 Feb 2004 11:09:00 GMT
As those who know me know, I’m not exactly the world’s most organized person. It’s not uncommon for me to over-organize a few small things while large swaths of my life sit in disorder for way too long. Sometimes it bothers me, some times it doesn’t. It tends to go in cycles of two or three years–the disorder will start to bother me for one reason or another, so I’ll start some new way of organizing things, only to drop it after I’ve made enough of a dent in things so the disorder doesn’t bother me anymore.
I’m currently in the middle of one of those cycles. I’ve had too many things piling up at home and at work recently, and I feel like I was losing track of most of the things that I needed to be doing. Every time something new added itself to my plate, something else fell off.
I started by trying to keep a simple to-do list in iCal and syncing it onto my phone, but that just doesn’t cut it. I need to be able to break big tasks down into smaller pieces in order to manage them, but if I do that, then I end up with a huge long linear list that is too big to be manageable. So I avoid putting little things onto the list, so they don’t obscure the big things, except now I’m losing track of things again.
I’m currently in the middle of phase two: I’m trying out better software for managing to-do lists. I’m kind of excited about Life Balance, which is kind of new-age sounding, but seems to do what I want. You lay out your life as a series of goals and projects in a big hierarchy. Leaf nodes in the tree are essentially to-do items. Each node has a priority and an effort metric associated with it, along with an optional to-do date, location, and some other settings. Life Balance then tries to produce a simple, linear to-do list of what you need to be working on right now. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful then that sounds, because it can gauge the importance of different projects and sub-projects against each other, and then try to balance them using the feedback that you provide.
Life Balance runs on Macs, Windows PCs, and Palms. The Palm and desktop versions sync with each other, and the Palm version can sync its version of the to-do list with the system to-do list. I’m currently testing Life Balance out along with Agendus on a Clie that I’ve had sitting around for a couple years. I’m still tuning the way I use the two programs, but they seem to interact almost perfectly. I’ll write up a longer review when I decide to buy them.
Posted in Mac stuff, Handheld and PDA, Personal | Tags agendus, ical, lifebalance, palm, pim
