How to best Manage your life using MLO like a Project Manager?

Josh Mason

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Jun 24, 2022, 2:10:05 AM6/24/22

to MyLifeOrganized

Hey guys, I'm new to MLO. I wish to utilize MLO as my LMS/LOS (Life Mgmt/operating system), systematically managing and living my life, can you help me with setting up a Systematic Life-Outline? (similar to a WBS in a Project)...

Current: I’m currently managing my life very systematically with individual life goal progress and roll-up to a accumulated life score in excel, but excel does summary/sub-tasks very poorly. I’ve contemplated using MS Projects, and other PM software’s. I want to use MLO.

Requirements:
Brief Example:

Life Score: 75% (Sum of all goal progress: 100%+50%)/2)

Goal 1 100%
1. Sub Goal 1
  1. Task 1

1. 1. 1. Once-off Sub Task 1
    2. Recurring Sub Task 2
    3. Recurring Sub Task etc
  3. Task 2
    1. Once-off Sub Task 1
    2. Recurring Sub Task 2
    3. Recurring Sub Task 3
  5. Task etc
    1. Once-off Sub Task 1
    2. Recurring Sub Task 2
    3. Recurring Sub Task etc
2. Sub Goal 2/etc
  4. Task 1
    1. Once-off Sub Task 1
    2. Recurring Sub Task 2
    3. Recurring Sub Task etc

Goal 2 50%
1. Same structure for each/every goal
Goal 3, 4, 5 etc

Notes:

All items need to be tracked and reported in; Planned, Actual, Variance, Change from previous time-period, past-present-future, in totals and in averages.
Need to be recording Est Start Date, EED, ETC, AST, AED, ATC for each layer/level from goal-sub goal-task-subtask. Basically your standard project management tracking and reporting requirements; who, what, when, where, why, how, planned v actual, from project inception through to forecasted completion
Also want to be able to assign weighted values to various goals among a few other things, like assigning statuss, archiving once completed, auto-scheduling tasks, gant/calendar/table or sheet views etc...

I’m fairly confident MLO can do all this... does anyone already have a same/similar 'Life Outline' they can template and share to save time?

Much appreciated everyone!

Also, I would love to chat with fellow systematic life managers/'livers' and bounce ideas off eachother!

Happy Life Managing!

Josh

Craig Lindholm

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Jul 13, 2022, 8:44:05 AM7/13/22

to MyLifeOrganized

Wow!

Honestly that sounds exhausting, yet weirdly satisfying. I can see it’s merit in life work balance planning. Is this something you have come up with, or is it a known thing? I did a Google search for “systematic life-outline” but didn’t come up with anything.

Do you have any resources on this philosophy?

Craig

Stéph

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Jul 13, 2022, 1:39:42 PM7/13/22

to MyLifeOrganized

Hello Josh,

Well, the good news is that outline lists and "life score" (ie overall progress score) are all part of MLO. However...

Notes:

All items need to be tracked and reported in; Planned, Actual, Variance, Change from previous time-period, past-present-future, in totals and in averages.

- Neither these metrics nor the ability to compare the file now with a previous version are built into MLO. You'd have to export to xml and then do some nifty programming in some other app to be able to do that.

Need to be recording Est Start Date, EED, ETC, AST, AED, ATC for each layer/level from goal-sub goal-task-subtask. Basically your standard project management tracking and reporting requirements; who, what, when, where, why, how, planned v actual, from project inception through to forecasted completion

- I don't know what most of those abbreviations even are. I take it they come from project management and planning software, like Microsoft Project, or something even more complex.

Also want to be able to assign weighted values to various goals among a few other things, like assigning statuss, archiving once completed, auto-scheduling tasks, gant/calendar/table or sheet views etc...

- Weighted values? You should be able to do something with Importance and Urgency scores.
- Goal status - certain values are built in. You could also use contexts or flags to do something specific to your needs.
- Auto-backup of your outline and auto-archive of completed tasks can both be configured within MLO and are pretty robust.
- Gantt charts - not built in. Maybe you could do something with an app which can read xml, like Microsoft PowerBI - although I wasn't able to get PowerBI to make any sense of an xml export of my MLO outline, so couldn't help you with this advanced stuff.

in summary, the level of automation and reporting you want would require some heavyweight project management tool, I think. MLO's strength is in setting up a simple outline with some manual tags and then being able to set up some quite complex views, with custom filtering, sorting and grouping, to show your tasks in the order and groups you need at various stages in your workflow. Automation and dependencies, along with change tracking, are not its strength and would need some other software - perhaps with a link to use task data exported from MLO.