E-Volution IT

In this series of articles we’ll be taking a look at a number of time management / personal organizer applications. The second application we’re looking at is MyLife Organized. Previously we looked at EssentialPIM.

The MyLife Organized Philosophy

The following is from the MLO help file regarding the MLO philosophy:

Every day many of us spend the time on urgent but low priority tasks while the most important tasks get put off until another day. Unfortunately, “another day” never seems to arrive. If you keep putting things off, you’ll eventually wake up one day and realize life has passed you by.

MyLife software helps you to think and act differently - and doing things differently is the first step in digging yourself out of the procrastination rut. The main idea of MyLife is to help you to plan and organize your time in such a way that you accomplish your most important goals as quickly as possible. Organize your goals/projects/tasks into a tree and MyLife will generate a simple To Do list of actions for you. This list will contain only those actions that require immediate attention. The To Do list will be sorted in order of priority so that you can stay focused on what is really important to you.

One of the key advantages of MyLife is that despite being a very powerful and sophisticated piece of software it is extremely easy for even the most novice of computer users. It will not replace your Calendar, Outlook or Excel, but it will help you to organize your tasks and generate concrete and sequential list of specific actions to achieve your goals as quickly as possible.

What Stood Out Immediately

 Nothing pretty

The first thing to stand out was the lack of visual appeal. MLO has most certainly been developed with functionality in mind. Personally, having used hundreds of different computer applications, I find that a visually appealing interface somehow makes a world of difference. I’m not alone in that regard either. Why is Apple Mac so appealing  to creative and artistic people (and so often copied by other computer and OS manufacturers? The hardware and the OS look, well, sleek and sexy. What’s the major change for general users from Windows 95 to XP to Vista? The looks, the gloss, the techno glamour — the resemblance to the Apple Mac OS. MyLife Organized has much room for improvement in this area.

Comprehensive Time Management Features

Where MLO loses out in gloss, it most certainly makes up for it in functionality. It knocks the socks off EssentialPIM in this regard, except in one particular area. As mentioned in the EssentialPIM review, one of its stand-out features is the daily overview (called EPIM Today). Sadly MLO is lacking this.

MLO has a comprehensive set of data sets for each task, such as:

• The ability to distinguish between Projects and tasks within a project
• An advanced locations system. You can set up an unlimited list of locations, specify when certain locations are available (i.e. the office might be somewhere you only go to from 9 to 5), and specific locations within locations. For example, you can set up the phone as a location, and then put phone within office and home. What this means is that MLO will know you are able to perform the task with phone as its location when you are at home and when you are at work. You can sort by location, so when you’re at work it will show you all the things you’re actually able to achieve at that location, and not the stuff you intend to do at the hardware store or hairdresser.

Super Prioritization System

Simply put, MyLife Organized has an amazing prioritization system. They call it Computer-Score Priority. In their words:

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 (and also the Time you set for that task).

How much effect the start and due date will have on the overall urgency of the task can be configured in the MLO preferences. The preferences allow you to set the start and due date weighting factors individually. The higher you set the weights, the more influence the dates will have on the list ordering

 Task-List

In addition to the stand-out task features mentioned above, each task has the following data associated with it:

Everything that one might expect, along with an Effort meter, which is something a bit different.

Task / Project Overview

Again, nothing pretty, yet the Task / Project overview comes with some nifty features. MLO drills down by Place and also by how much time you have (optional). So if your at the office and you have 45 minutes up your sleeve, you might get a view like the one above (using the demo data).

Compared to EssentialPIM the unique feature in MLO is this how much time I have filter. EssentialPIM lets you search by location, but i does not have the Effort Meter found in MLO, so it can’t filter by this factor. I guess for some users this might come in rather handy. I’ve got 20 minutes, I’m at home, what can I complete in that time?

 Remember, the Computer Score Priority system (if activated) means the MLO will sort your Task / Project List according to priority which it automatically calculates for you. This makes it really easy to see exactly what requires your attention right now despite how seemingly urgent or important various other tasks (or a lower priority) are.

Daily Overview

MyLife Organized does not have a daily overview in the way that EssentialPIM does. I really wish it did. In my opinion this is the one thing that makes EssentialPIM stand out because it looks so darn useful to be able to just see a clear (and printable) schedule of that day.

Import / Export

Something a little different here is that MyLife Organized can import and export MindManager format. MindManager is a fantastic application I use a lot. Nice one. Check it out at Mindjet.

Exporting:

At the moment, MyLife Organized can export to the following formats:

1. MyLife Organized XML document (*.xml)
2. MyLife Organized template (*.mlt)
3. Text tab delimited document (*.tab)
4. Excel XML document (*.xml)
5. MindManager XML document (*.xml)

When exporting, you are given a choice to export only the selected branch (task with all subtasks), or the entire outline.

Importing:

MyLife Organized imports all the formats listed above, except Excel XML.

When importing, you are given a choice to import to the selected task or to the root of the outline.

Synchronizing

MyLife Organized can sync with Outlook, Palm, and the Pocket PC version of MyLife Organized. Oddly, there only option in the File menu for synchronizing is related to Outlook, so I am going off the help file when I say it will support these other methods.

Getting Things Done

For those people familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and philosophy, MyLife Organized has some appealing trump cards. MLO has a template based system for starting new databases. Built in are four Getting Things Done templates. From the basic GTD organization system through to a life focus area template. I can see that MyLife Organized would certainly make working with the Getting Things Done time management system quick and easy. There is also quite a bit of information on the internet exploring how to make the most of using MLO for the Getting Things Done system.

Concluding thoughts

If you want your Time Management software to do some of the thinking in terms of what you do when then MyLife Organized would be the way to go. Its computer based priority scoring and the effort meter give it a distinct advantage in this area. 

If you want to handle the prioritization part of your Time Management yourself, and you want to have a nice daily overview of things to do each day, then you might prefer EssentialPIM. Many people find it really hard to prioritize their to-do list and I believe this is the issue MLO is very specifically trying to address.