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First Start
The concept of Activities and Priorities (AAP) is very new and innovative. Therefore, please, read Overview first if you have not done it before, to know what the AAP idea is, what AAP is for and how it can be useful to you.
Using Activities and Priorities is simple. To start using AAP you basically should do four things
- Start Activities and Priorities. You can do it as you usually do for other programs, e.g. from Windows Start Menu.
- Decide which activities are the important parts of your life and enter their names into column Activity of Input Panel. To determine your most important activities and relevant wellness dimensions you may use free Dynamic Time Management Guide and the links in Wellness Exercise Program page. Though we believe that you can do it yourself, if you prefer, for the separate charge we may help you to figure out your personal set of the most important activities or wellness dimensions. Use the support page to request the personal help.
Since Activities are important parts of your life they are stable and most probably you will rarely change the names of activities. To make your life a bit easier AAP have the preset activities name that you will see at the first start.
You may leave the activities names as is if you like them or just type your new names instead of preset ones.
- Decide what percent of waking time (approximately) you would like to spend for each activity and enter these values into Time Part % column of Input Panel. Most probably you will rarely change these values. As in the case of activity names for your convenience there are preset values of Time Part %. You may type new ones or leave preset values as is. Instead of % you may also enter the time parts in hours per week, day or month.
- Every day (better at the beginning of the day or at the end of it) enter approximate time spent for the activities. There is no need to remember exact time. The natural precision with which you remember time spent for an activity during the day at the end of this day or in the morning of next one is enough. AAP is tolerant to natural errors in the input time.
When you enter the spent time the program recalculates priorities of your activities and shows them in Priority (Activity) Panel at the right part of the screen. In priority panel activities are ordered according to their priorities with high priorities at the top. Priority panel uses colors so that you can easily see which activities have been relatively neglected and hence have higher priority and which received enough time.
(For the illustration purpose we use image with more than three activities that is possible only in registered Pro version)
The meaning of colors in Priority panel is follows:
- Red color means that the attention paid to corresponding activity is very small compared to the plan (compared to the time part you set for it). Such activities have the highest priorities and you should pay attention to them as soon as possible.
- The orange color corresponds to the activities in the danger zone.
- The white rows qualitatively correspond to the activities, which priorities might be a little higher than normal but the deviation is not significant.
- And finally, if the time spent for an activity is certainly more or equal to plan, the corresponding row is green.
Further details and features of AAP can be learned from Tutor. But in principle it is enough information in this page to start to use AAP. We tried to make AAP intuitive i.e. it should behave as other typical Windows program in similar situation. Do not afraid to experiment. Use F1 key for the help. Good luck and happy, balanced and harmonized life with Activities and Priorities!
And by the way, AAP saves your work automatically on exit and opens the last work automatically when starts.
Special note for the registered Pro version users. Since in Pro version as distinct from light one you can use more than three activities and use divisions you might find more convenient to start not from the simple template with three activities as was described in this page but from more complex sample with divisions. To learn how you can do it, follow this hyperlink.
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