… to be even more disorganized. (Working subtitle: Technology is a decent organizational tool, as long as it’s kept in its place.)

Earlier this week Llamagraphics released Life Balance 3.2.4 for Windows, Mac, and Palm OS. If you have a registered copy of Life Balance 3.x, this is a free upgrade.

I need to be clear on something. I am obviously not anti-technology. However, I see far too many people who are utterly dependent on technology to live. I definitely have gadgets; cell phones, PDAs, more computers than a single person should rightly have, and the iPod mini of course. It’s all pretty useless when it comes to maintaining order in one’s life, even with software like Life Balance.

And now it’s time for another Fabulously Bad Analogy!

Getting organized is like building a house.

“Huh?”

Just bear with me for a moment.

When you’re building a house, you are taking a whole lot of unorganized material and building a structure – literally, ordering it in a way that is (hopefully) pleasing to the eye and practical to live in. In much the same way, getting your life organized is collecting and ordering the “stuff” in a way that is (hopefully) easy to use and practical to live with. Just like you can’t build a house using only a nail gun and a drill, it takes more to get organized than a PDA and a software tool like Outlook or Life Balance.

Anyway, Life Balance fills a very specific need. In this modern, high-volume information age, it’s a valuable dynamic list management tool I use to keep up with the unrelenting flood of things that demand my attention. It’s all useless without a system, as I mentioned long, long ago, in a galaxy far… er, wait… in February. Life Balance is the nail gun to Outlook’s hammer; HDTV to the original black and white sets; the heliocentric solar system to Ptolemy’s geocentric with its epicycles.

We have the technology… Better… stronger… faster. Especially faster. Working the system with as little effort as possible is what this tool is all about. Spend less time figuring out what to do and more time just doing it.

Now having said all that, back to my main point: if all of my gadgets disappeared tomorrow – and I mean all of my gadgets – I could still work this system well with paper and a good pen. That’s exactly what I mean by saying that they’re pretty useless for maintaining order in one’s life. After all, they’re just tools. The power is in how they are manipulated.