BALANCED PLANNER

"A man is what he thinks about all day long." – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"L’homme n’est rien d’autre que la somme de ses actes, de sa vie" – Jean-Paul Sartre.





Your plans. Your life. The gap.
Due to emotions and ever aggressive online marketing tricks,
it is easier and easier to be captured by new interests, dive in, and forget everything else.
This tool is a special task management tool that gives you
the support for defining and monitoring the proportions you will spend your time on.

GOALS

defining the goals is defining the pie of how you want to spend your time.
Following the proportions of the pie of life will help pursuing multiple goals with the desired level of depth.

goals are not time-bounded.
what you define in the goals screen is something that won't change often, ideally it's is revised once in a year, or after a major shock in life.
They define pursues that are achieved in parallel.
their two key properties are:
- the time percentage we want to spend on them
- the time allocation constraints ("rule").

goals pct

assuming a day of 14 active hours, like:
08:00-13:00,
14:00-20:00,
21:00-24:00,
and a week of 14*5+ 11*2 = 192



Goal pct
Equivalent daily time
7%
~ 1.0 hours/day
22%
~ 3.0 hours/day
25%
~ 3.5 hours/day
29%
~ 4.0 hours/day
32%
~ 4.5 hours/day
2.2%
~ 2 hours/week

goals rules

rules are logic expressions that can use these three variables: h, dow, ymd, ymdh (start-of-hour of the day, 0-23, day of week, Monday=1 and Sunday=7, ymd=a specific day, ymdh=a specific hour slot)
for example: an activity that should be scheduled on Sunday morning should be constrained by this rule:
	
	dow==7 and h<13

a top-level rule is defined as:

	(h>=8 and h!=13 and h!=20) and not (dow>=6 and h>=20)

because of that, no matter of what is defined as goal-level rules,
the planner will never allocate activities during breakfast, lunch and dinner time, on Sunday morning and on Saturday night.

day of week: on Mon, dow=1; on Tue, dow=2 and on Sun, dow=7
h is the hour of the one-hour time slot.
dow value is 20241231 on the EOY day of 2024

TASKS

tasks are time-bounded.
their two key properties are the sequence and the estimated hours.
They also have a residual time to go that is updated when the user tick a timeslot as done in the planner screen.
The tool can compute and show the final ETC of each task.
After a re-plan, the ETC of tasks is updated.

moving tasks across goals

A task T assigned to goal A can be migrated and reassigned to goal B. The steps are as follows:
- from the screen Goals: select the goal A and open its Tasks screen
- select the task T and go back to the screen Goals
- select the (new) Goal B and press the button Acquire.		

other operations on tasks

If a task is completed prematurely, you can update the estim hours value int he TASKS screen.

PLAN

the plan screen shows a calendar with the proposed timeslots. A user can tick a timeslot as done/missed.			

plan horizon

if you press the button re-plan, the time window between the next hour and six month from now are recalculated.
the previous allocations are lost and overwritten.

tasks ETC

after a re-plan, the ETC of each task is recomputed. It can be seen in the tasks screen.

BACK-TEST

Thank you and happy planning!