Review by Jeffrey A. Shumway

My Life Organized

Date: 15-Dec 2005
Autor: Jeffrey A. Shumway
Application: MyLife Organized - Version 1.5.01
Platforms: Windows & PocketPC
Website: www.mylifeorganized.net

TASK MANAGEMENT

Task management is a big topic. Many people simply use a Post It and hope to keep track of all of their tasks, but that is really insufficient in these busy times. I believe that you have to evolve beyond Post-Its and find a system that will work for you.

To get started in this area, there are quite a few books written to address the issues of task management. Franklin Covey has quite a few good books, but my favorite is written by David Allen called "Getting Things Done" (GTD). Mr. Allen has some excellent ideas for gathering your thoughts in one place and taking control of the massive flow of information that we all must review and understood.

One of the primary points of GTD is to stop rethinking your tasks. Too often, people attempt to remember ALL of their many tasks. This creates open loops that require many thought cycles and keep you from prioritizing tasks and "getting things done". If you have one system for recording your tasks, you close the open loops and remove a great deal of stress from your life.

Up until this review started, I have been using Outlook to accomplish the GTD methodology. I have tasks that revolve around Agendas (@Agendas), Projects (@Projects), Locations (ex. @Work), and the ever useful Someday/Maybe. If you tweak Outlook a bit, it is not a bad tool for the task, but it lacks the shear power of My Life Organized. Since I have used Outlook for this task, I felt that I should compare and contrast MLO with Outlook's task management capability. As you will see, there is really no comparison powerwise, but it was my personal point of reference.

MY LIFE ORGANIZED

To begin with, I found MLO a little overwhelming. It is a very powerful task management tool. One of the things that I did at first to help with the amount of detail is to go to the Options screen, select the appearance option, and select "Simple checklist tree". At least from a beginners standpoint, this helped me get my feet wet without completely overwhelming me. It also made the view similar to what I was seeing in Outlook.

I then imported my Outlook data to have some real meaningful information to work with. The Outlook data come over pretty well and I was able to see the full detail of my tasks. I use the note field extensively to document my task and that was readily available on the right side of the MLO screen.

As I examined my tasks, I could not figure out how they were sorted. In the options screen, there are two options for sorting the To-Do list. One is Hierarchical Priority and the other is Computed-Score Priority. This is one area where MLO excels. Outlook allows you to sort by up to four field levels, but it is a raw a,b,c,d sort. MLO's sortation provides much more power.

From the excellent MLO help file: [Hierarchical Priority] mode uses the following parameters to order the tasks in your To-Do List:

1) Weekly Goal: If the task is a "weekly goal" it is placed at the top
of the To-Do List
2) Importance: If a project has a higher importance than other
projects on the same level, all its subtasks are placed higher in the
To-Do List than subtasks of other projects on this level.
3) Time: The closer the task's deadline, the higher the task is placed
in the To-Do list.
4) Completion: The closer a project is to being complete, the higher
its tasks are placed in the To-Do list.

[Computed-Score Priority] mode uses the details you supply about each task to compute an individual score for each task in your outline. These scores are then used to provide a priority-ordered To-Do List. The two factors that contribute to each task's score are its Importance and its Urgency.

1) Importance: Set the importance of each task relative to only its parent item. Items with higher importance will be near the top of the To-Do list. If a parent task has a lower importance; that will lower the importance of its child tasks (Importance inherits down the outline with decreasing weight).

2) Urgency: Set the urgency of each task relative to only its parent item. Items that have a higher urgency will be near the top of the To-Do list. If a parent task has a higher urgency; that will raise the urgency of its child tasks (Urgency inherits down the outline with increasing weight).

3) Time: If you set a due date or a due date + start date; then the urgency of the task will be boosted as those dates get closer and go past. Urgency will continue to climb even if the task is severely overdue.

I left MLO in the default Hierarchical Priority mode, but it still left my tasks in an order that made little sense to me. Well actually, it made sense based on the help file descriptions, but it was not what I wanted to see. MLO lacked the information necessary to sort the data in the order I wanted. I figured that I better start entering some of the task details and properties that were not available in Outlook.

But first, I decided to import one of the templates that are provided at http://www.mylifeorganized.net. I picked the Getting Things Done template and noticed its organization structure. The personal agendas that I had set up as tasks are set up as folders with tasks listed below them. In GTD, you can list a person or group as an agenda and then assign tasks and other agendas to that person or group. By listing them as a folder it made the agendas much more concise and legible.

At this point, I noticed that I wanted some of the power that I hid when I started the evaluation. I went back to options and switched to Full Mode. This allowed me to see the full power and now that I was becoming more comfortable with the program, I was happy to see the additional configuration options and views that were available to me.

As I started poking around and fleshing out the properties of my tasks, I noted that some of my tasks are really projects, but Outlook does not have the ability to differentiate. I changed my tasks that represented projects quite simply by clicking the Project checkbox in the task properties. The task turned blue and would now show up in the "Projects" view. I then added some tasks associated with the projects and my tasks become much clearer. You can also drag existing tasks and make them sub tasks of another task, which was handy as I cleaned up my Outlook task list. Plus, when a sub task is added it acquires its parents due date. This is a nice touch.

Other tasks that I created were tied to categories that represented locations (places). MLO surpasses Outlook in this area as well. You can easily assign a task to multiple locations and then easily see the task in those location categories in the To-Do tab view. From the To-Do view, simply select the location from the place drop-down and you will only see tasks that are appropriate for the current location.

After a little poking around I noticed that you can change the view from All Tasks to many other viewing methods. I changed the view to "By Due Date" and I was able to quickly review the tasks that had assigned due dates in groups such as Overdue, This Month, Next Month, and Future. This helped visualization of the timeline of my tasks. You can also change the view to Goals, Projects, By Start Date, Completed Projects, Created, Modified, and Completed.

Since I wanted to clean up my tasks, I decided that I wanted to see which tasks are not assigned to a location. This was easily accomplished by going to the To-Do list and selecting place <no where>. I could then assign a location with ease.

Places can have time assigned. In other words, work is from 8:00 - 5:00, etc. I don't think that I need this level of detail, but it is yet another area that MLO offers that Outlook does not.

VERSIONS

There are three versions of MLO. Light (freeware), Standard, and Pro. Hopefully my table with show up correctly, but if not, go to http://www.mylifeorganized.net/products/my-life-organized/features.htm to review the features. Basically if you want Goal setting, you need Standard and if you need Project tracking and Outlook synchronization, you need Pro.

Feature L S P
1. Task outliner (projects/tasks/subtasks) + + +
2. Generating ordered To Do list + + +
3. Task Importance + + +
4. XML Import/Export + + +
5. Minimize to system tray + + +
6. Customizable appearance + + +
7. Places/situations for tasks - + +
8. Goal setting - + +
9. Time - + +
10. Complete subtasks in order - + +
11. Projects tracking - - +
12. Synchronization with MS Outlook - - +

SUMMARY

Overall, I loved MLO. It is a wonderful stepping stone between Outlook and Microsoft Project. Outlook provides basic task management and will get the job done for many people, but it lacks the finesse and polish of MLO. Project is more powerful (debatably, since I hate using it), but it is cumbersome and seems to be designed to control teams and resources at a scale that does not suit my personal and business life. MLO is just the right task for the busy professional that wants to take control of their life. Highly recommended.

Jeffrey A. Shumway, 15-Dec 2005