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Glossary
- AAP
- AAP is the abbreviation for Activities and Priorities (or Activities & Priorities) i.e. for the name of this program.
- Active cell
- Active cell is marked by the rectangular cursor.
. It is the cell in which the data is entered or edited if the user starts typing. To activate a cell, click with the mouse in the desired cell. You might need to click twice if the panel (window) in which the cell is located is not in the focus (has not been activated).
- Active day
- Day, for which you enter the time spent for the activities in this day and which is visible at the top part of Input Panel.
- Active week
- The week, to which Active Day belongs (in AAP the first day of the week is Sunday).
- Active row
- The row that contains an active cell.
- Activity
- In AAP the activity means an important part of your life. In terms of the wellness it is the wellness dimension or subdimensions. It is something that you will or should or have to do all or significant part of your life more or less regularly to maintain the wellness and achieve your life goals. The activity usually has no predefined schedule. However, if you spent not enough time for an activity or don't do it more or less regularly it eventually provokes the crisis or disorder. As distinct from tasks, every day problems etc there are few important activities. Their number is usually between 3 and 16. You may find the comparison between the sets of activities suggested by different authors and links to numerous examples in Wellness Dimensions page online. A few short examples are below:
- Occupation (work). In principle you can do nothing as long as you would like to. But if you will not work regularly it could not only cause the problem with money but also will have bad psychological consequences. In our times many people can allow themselves the free schedule at work. For creative peoples sometimes it is even useful to take a rest in working hours if they cannot solve a hard problem for a long time. However, even such people usually should work regularly to have the success.
- Social life. You are not obliged from time to time meet friends, just chart with colleges at work, attend parties etc. But if you do not do it more or less regularly very probably that people will not like you and nobody will help or support you when you will need the help. So, it is better to spend some time to the social life and especially pay attention to such close people as spouse, parents and children. Usually it is impractical and strange to have strict schedule for such things but you nevertheless should do it regularly.
- Physical exercises. Again, usually nobody obliges you to do them. But most people feel better, live longer and have fewer problems with health if they do. However you should do the exercises more or less regularly or they will have no positive effect. It is even more important than nature of the exercises. On the other hand strict scheduler is not so important. It even can be useful to rest from exercises when you fill very tired or ill.
- Activity Item
- Activity Item is either an Activity or a Division.
- Activity View
- Activity View is the default state of main Activities and Priorities window when there are two panels in view: Priorities of Activities panel (or in short Priority panel) and Input panel.
- Arithmetic Operations
- In most boxes, where you input numbers such as spent time, time parts etc, simple arithmetic operations + (plus), - (minus), / (division) and * (multiplication) are allowed. However parentheses are NOT allowed. For instance you can type 2:10*7 entering the time (with the result 15:10) or 2.4 +5.5 entering the percents (with the result 7.9).
- Division
- The division is a collection of the activities and other divisions (subdivisions). It is similar to the folder or directory. All properties of a division in this program, except for the division name, are completely determined by the subdivisions and activities that are inside the division. For example, it might be convenient to put such activities as Jogging and (physical) Exercises into division Health (because they in general help improve or maintain the health). Then you can monitor whether you put enough attention to the health in general. In the Activities and Priorities panels the divisions have yellow color. The name of the embraced division is automatically added by the program to the names of the activities and subdivisions that are inside it with the dot as separator. In the above example the full name of Jogging in division Health would be "Health. Jogging".
- Division Priority panel
- Division Priority panel can be seen in the bottom right part of Division View in main Activities and Priorities window. It has title "Priorities of Divisions". Division Priority facilitates the comparison of division priorities.
- Division View
- Division View is the state of main Activities and Priorities window when there is additional Division Priority panel (with the title "Priorities of Divisions") that facilitates the comparison of division priorities.
- Entering Time
- When you enter the time you can use both: and . to separate minutes. For example for the time input 15:10 and 15.10 both mean 15 hours 10 minutes. Seconds are not allowed. Note that in this version, if you enter minutes alone, you still must explicitly type 0 for hours. For example if you would like to enter 12 minutes you should type 0.12 or 0:12
- Forgetting™ concept.
- See Oblivion™ concept and tolerance™.
- Forgiveness™ concept.
- See Oblivion™ concept and tolerance™.
- Full Name
- Full name of an activity or division includes the name of the activity or division preceded with the names of activities and divisions that contain the activity or division and separated by dots. For instance, the full name of activity Jogging in division Health will look like Jogging. Health
- Input Panel
- Input Panel is the window in the left part of the main Activities and Priorities window. It has title "Input". In the input panel you usually enter such data as time spent for an activity.
- Oblivion™ concept.
- If so happened that you could not pay attention to an activity for a long time, in most cases it will be not only impossible but also useless, strange and even harmful trying to spend all that you planned earlier, especially in a short period of time. Think for example what could happen if someone would try to compensate the years of negligence of physical exercises in one day. Or imagine how strange would be observe a person that suddenly began to chart with the colleges all working day long trying to restore the friendly relationships that were neglected before. In most such cases it would be more wise just begin to spend for an activity the planned time but do it regularly. AAP is designed in accordance with such a wise decision. If you spend the planned time regularly AAP will gradually forget your time "debts" after a month or two. This is also in accordance with human nature. People tend to forget what you have done in about a week unless you keep doing it regularly and even our bodies to some extent in a way forget what we did in respect to the physical exercises, for instance. See also tolerance.
- Panel
- A window with the table in main Activities and Priorities window. There could be up to three panels in the view: Input panel, Activities of Priorities panel (or in short Priority panel), and Priorities of Divisions panel (with the title "Priorities of Divisions").
- Priority
- In AAP the priority of an activity is determined by the ratio of the (reduced) time you spent for an activity to time you planned to spend on it. It is easier to explain with an example. Let as assume that you planned to spend 10 minutes for jogging and 20 minutes for (physical) exercises. Let us assume that you have achieved you goal and have spent time exactly as you planned. Then priorities for jogging and exercises are equal. Their priorities are also equal (although have smaller values) if your have spent twice as you have planned for both of the activities: 20 and 40 minutes correspondingly. But if you have spent for jogging 20 minutes and for exercises also 20 minutes the priority of jogging is smaller because the actual time to plan ratio for jogging 20/10 = 2 is greater than for the exercises 20/20 = 1. In other words you have spent for the jogging more than you have planned while for the exercises just as you have planned and therefore the priority for jogging is currently less than for exercises. We hope that you grasp the idea. You could make several simple experiments to check whether the definition of priorities is in accordance with the usual intuitive approach and common sense. There is also more technical and detailed explanation.
- Priority panel or Priority of Activities panel
- Priority panel is the window in the right or top right part of the main Activities and Priorities window. It has title "Priority of Activities" and allows easily compare the priorities of the activities and decides what to do first.
- Reduced™ time (spent for an activity)
- To calculate priority of an activity, the program uses the reduced time to be tolerant to natural small errors in input time. To forget and forgive errors the program multiply the time spent in past weeks by the oblivion coefficient. The more distant in the past is the week, the less is oblivion coefficient. For the current week the oblivion coefficient is equal to one (no oblivion), for the past week it is about 1/2 and so on. After several months the program almost completely forgets how much time you spent for an activity in such a distant past as most people do.
- Statistically insignificant
- In most of cases Statistically insignificant means that the deviation is so small, that it is inside the limits of natural deviations or fluctuations that are inevitable in the real life. The exact definition is rather technical and can be found in any good mathematical textbook. For those who are familiar with this subject we will add that we compare the average deviation with so called standard one.
- Tolerance™ (to errors in spent time and its date).
- It would be tedious, ridiculous and useless to remember exact time that you spend for an activity in sufficiently distant past. Therefore the program gradually forgets how much time you spent in a day as the day moves to the past. The influence of the past week is about two times less than present one and so on. It makes programs tolerant to small errors in input time. The more distant the time of input is the less is influence of an error. Therefore it possible to input spent time only approximately: the deeper is the past the less accurate you can be. The program is also tolerant to errors in the date of the time spending. See also Oblivion™ concept.
- Waking time
- Waking time is the upper limit of the time you can spent for all activities in a day. Exact value of waking time is not very important. The point is that the waking time has no influence on priority values. It is assumed also that total time you plan to spend for all the activities is always less than the waking time since you should always have some time for rest and leisure with arbitrary and random activity. There are two reasons why the waking time was introduced:
- To be sure that you have not planned for your activities so much time that it exceeds all reasonable limits.
- To give the values from Time Part % column in Input Panel the well-defined counterpart in time: (time for an activity per day)=(Time Part %)x(Waking time).
Since as was explained above the exact value of waking time is not so important in AAP it was rather arbitrary set to be 16 hours per day.
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