Life Balance and MyLife Organized

In another thread, people asked about Life Balance and MyLife Organized. After spending the last couple of hours examining them both, there are my observations and recommendations.

Life Balance is designed to help you keep strategic areas of your life in check. If you are out of balance, it can help you see that. It has powerful task functions to support that. 

Life Balance is TRO capable, but barely. I'm leery of recommending it, because, the task editing feature is slow and murky. To set a Hard Date requires at least 7 clicks. Multi-categorization must be abandoned in favor of single-level categorization. You cannot entirely exclude family/home tasks during work time or vice versa. Without sorting options, finding the right next task takes more time than it needs to. (LB is also missing Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry applications, with "no plans" to create them.)

Instead, you could balance your life with a Strategic Calendar (taught in the TRO training) and use a faster task manager that integrates with email, like Toodledo. You get more benefits in less time. That's why I don't actively recommend Life Balance.

MyLife Organized is fully TRO capable, and with the right customization, it could work fairly well. The nexus allows you to add sub-tasks when its important and still see the tasks in priority order. I wish it had inline task editing and easier task sorting, but both are livable. It is offline, for those who need an offline task solution.

If you're reading this thread and considering MLO, be aware of the drawbacks: It's a little slower, clunkier, and less customizable than Toodledo. Changing the sort is difficult. You'll need to set up a local sync instead of getting an automatic sync via the web, and you'll lack email integration. The $50 price tag is also higher than a full subscription to Toodledo. 

To TRO train with MyLife Organized, you would use Star, Start and Due dates the same as in Toodledo, but your day-to-day use case and setup would be more similar to ToDoList. Look at TRO instructions for both and customize for your situation.

The reason we don't have a MLO TRO training is because there hasn't been significant demand. Most people who ask about it take a look at Toodledo or Donedesk and decide to go with one of those instead.

And there you have it, the TRO scoop on LB and MLO.

~coach nate
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