I used lifebalance for a couple of months awhile back and have since dropped it in favor of GTD. I did not find the systems to be compatible with each other.
I respectfully disagree that Life Balance and GTD are incompatible. GTD is a system
design, basically a set of habits. Life Balance is a tool that can be used to
implement an important component of GTD, where you process and organize your projects and actions lists. In fact, Life Balance is a tool that seems to be tailor-made for implementing GTD lists (though I believe it was developed long before GTD was published). I honestly can't imagine a *better* tool.
It is obvious from reading posts on these forums that many people struggle with certain aspects of GTD. For example, people struggle to link projects with next actions, or to know if a project has no next action defined. People also struggle to choose the most important next action from a long, long list of them; "trust your intuition" doesn't work well for everyone. Life Balance can handle both of these problems beautifully.
Because my experience has been different from yours, I just want to present another point of view for those who may be considering LB.
It places a lot of emphasis on prioritizing todo lists, which the software attempts to do for you. The idea of todo prioritization is frequently disparaged in Allen's book, and I have found this largely to be good advice.
I didn't get the impression that prioritizing is "frequently disparaged" in the book. My impression is that many ask how to prioritize their actions lists, and DA's answer is that rather than use a traditional, clunky, soon-out-of-date, not-too-useful 1-5 prioritizing scheme, just trust your intuition.
However, a lot of people aren't comfortable with trusting their intuition when they have to scan a huge long list. Actually, my intuition is not too bad, but
I really dislike having all my action items in totally random importance. Yuck.
In fact, I have always felt that "trust your intuition" contradicts one of the most useful and central principles of GTD: get everything out of your head and into a trusted system. "Trust your intuition" means to keep all that prioritization in your head.
I agree with DA that the traditional Day-Timer-type prioritization is lame. I agree that trusting intuition is better than constantly attempting to order and re-order (subsets of) your lists. But Life Balance has a powerful, elegant, and flexible mechanism for prioritizing.
Now that I have learned how to give it the right information, it routinely puts my most important actions at the top of my very long lists.
While I may have offloaded all my todos into the lifebalance software, I was constantly reassessing it's fuzzy-logic prioritizations of my todo items.
I don't understand. Why abandon the software just because the priorities don't look
exactly right? Is
totally random order really better than
not quite right?
It took me a little while to get used to how the software works. I had 2 main problems:
1) Without realizing it, when I entered a task's priority, I was really thinking about its priority in relation to my life as whole -- the traditional way of prioritizing. It felt weird to think about importance
only in relation to the task's immediate parent. When you do this at every level of the outline, everything magically falls into place -- roughly.
2) And "roughly" was my second problem. The perfectionist in me wanted to figure out how to get every single item listed in the exactly perfect order. I eventually realized that there is no such thing. For 2 tasks that are roughly equal priority, if they appear close to each other on the list, that's good enough.
There's no advantage to be gained in having a "perfectly" ordered list, even if such a thing existed. But I have found it
extremely helpful to have a list that's in pretty good order.
If I'm not spending enough time with my family, my intuition will tell me and I'll adjust. This type of cognitive overhead is not the stuff that Allen advocates offloading to paper and software.
Aside from LB, I know of no tool that really helps with priorities. There's no point for Allen to advocate offloading priorities to Outlook, vanilla Palm, or PDA lists -- the software doesn't give you any help. You do it all manually. It's more trouble than it's worth, because you have to consider everything on the list in relation to everything else on the list, which is hard. And as soon as you do it, new information could force you to re-do it. No change would propagate, so you'd have to re-prioritize everything manually. Ridiculous.
But Life Balance really can add value to your prioritizing. It can give you reasonably ordered lists with little effort. You never have to prioritize a task compared to every other task, only in relationship to its parent, which is easy. And you never have to re-order the whole list when things change. If the importance of a project, or area of focus, changes, one little adjustment propagates down to everything underneath it.
Life Balance's prioritization has helped me in 2 other major ways:
1) The feedback from LB as to how much time is spent in different areas of focus is
much more accurate than intuition. I do scientific research for a living; so I see constant proof that human intuitions are faulty. In fact, it's a foundational premise of science that human intuition is unreliable. Humans are poor at estimating how well they know or remember something, how much they have eaten, how much money they have spent, or how they've spent their time. How often do you hear advice from a financial planner to just trust your intuition about how much you're spending? Most people keep checkbook registers; why not just trust their intuition that they need to put more money in the bank? To me, time is more important than money, and feedback as to how my time resource is being used is valuable.
In fact, the pies showing how I've spent my time often surprise me. I can never believe how much time it takes maintaining stuff (house, cars, ROSES!). This shows that my intuitions are faulty. The accurate feedback from LB is better than intuition.
2) I tend to focus too much on one area of focus in my life, like work.
Eventually my intuition will realize that I've neglected other areas, but only
after I've neglected them for awhile. And there's always a price to pay for that neglect. This leads me into a vicious cycle where I then focus on a neglected area to catch up -- but then of course the original area gets neglected.
LB prevents this from happening by putting a task from some neglected area right at the top of my list. Intuitively, "Call my sister" never looks important next to "Revise proposal," but a look at the pies shows LB is right! My relationships with the people I care about have become better thanks to this nagging from LB. I have refined my importance settings and recurring intervals to the point where, if my "Actual" time spent is less than "Desired" time spent, that's when I start hearing complaints.
I recognize that not everyone has this same problem with balancing areas of focus, but for those that do, LB is a beautiful thing.
The slices of the life balance pie graph could potentially each reflect a project, but the software really doesn't seem suited to more than six or eight of these categories, so the net effect is to add another layer on top of one's project lists.
GTD really has extra layers too -- "areas of focus," "30,000 feet," etc. Life Balance allows me to integrate
all those layers into one tool. I don't have to pull out a separate areas of focus list, for example. The relationship of my projects to the 50,000' is clear and explicit in my Life Balance outline. In pure GTD, you have to keep that in your head.
Its integration with a calendar also seems kludgy. I have since abandoned trying to find a single software solution for project lists, action lists, contact lists and my calendar (more below).
Life Balance developers saw no need to reinvent the wheel by implementing
another calendar, but it is true that the built-in calendar on the Palm is kludgy.
All the built-in Palm software is kludgy. This is why many upgrade to a calendar like DateBook5. My calendar needs are simple enough that I don't need the upgrade. And three quick taps pulls up contact information needed to accomplish an action. Everything's all in my PDA, which is always with me.
Also, LB is expensive, though it's adherents feel it is a bargain for its effect.
I hate spending money for software. I hardly ever have to because of university licensing and grant money. But this is one of the few programs I've shelled out the money for.
Like I said, I'm sure that others have had good experience with LifeBalance. But try the demo and be critical of whether it fits in with GTD before buying a copy.
I recognize that Life Balance is not for everyone. But since there is a learning curve, people might abandon LB because they haven't learned to take take advantage of its powerful abilities. The developers were quick to help me while I trialed the demo -- pretty impressive. Support does not get any better. The forum there is a fabulous source of help as well.
I would certainly never want to be without Life Balance now. I use it to implement GTD and more.
I don't know how many times I've read a question posted here and thought, "Oh, I don't have to worry about that. Life Balance takes care of that for me."
-andersons
