Welcome to the Pathways Personal Life Planner, a tool to help you make important decisions about your life and then help you to carry them out. Pathways is useful for personal planning, household budgeting, and workgroup planning. When you buy a license, you are permitted to use it at both the home and office.
Pathways comes with complete online instructions for a 7-step planning process that will help you to improve your life. Also there are interactive planning wizards that will help you to get started. On this web site, we will give you a brief tour. Simply pick features of interest from the panel at the left, or advance through the features one-by-one by clicking the NEXT button at the bottom of each page.
Using Pathways, you plan "outcomes" on a grid. An outcome can be a goal or some potential result that you can foresee. Using the planning grid is as easy as "1, 2, 3."
For a quick way to get going with your plan, in Pathways click each of the 3 points marked by the arrows on the main window illustration and follow the corresponding instruction below.
Each coloured band ("panel") on the planning grid represents one person in your plan. Each has a title box. Arrow #1 in the previous illustration points to the first title box. Click in the title box, and a window will appear as follows:
Type your name in the box and click O.K. This will take you back to the planning grid.
Optionally you can add additional people to the plan by the same method.
Look back at the Planning Grid that was illustrated above. The horizontal axis is time. You can divide your plan into days, weeks, months, years, or any combination thereof. Each time period is called an "Era", and you can add, split, stretch, squeeze, or combine eras whenever you wish.
The titles below the coloured panels in the grid are the titles for the eras. Arrow #2 in the illustration points to an era title. Click in any era title, and the era definition form will appear in a separate window as follows:
When adding a new era, the section at right (at the right of the vertical white line) will be included in the form. The "Split," "Combine," and "Stretch/Squeeze" buttons are illustrated here so that you know they exist, but they don't show up the first time you create an era.
The easiest way to start is to create several eras at once. If any of the "add multiple..." buttons are clicked, the left side of the form changes so that you can choose the number of periods to put on the time scale.
You now have defined axes for the grid, where each square represents the intersection of a person and a time period. Click in the first grid square (marked #3 on the grid illustration above). This will cause the outcome window to appear.
You only need to fill in the top of the outcome window, illustrated here:
Everything below the blue line is optional, but to start with you don't need it. All you need to do is to type the name of your planned outcome into the box.
There is an O.K. button (near the bottom of the window, not illustrated here). Click it, and you will be returned to the main planning grid.
You can add additional outcomes in the same manner, depending on what you want in your plan.
By completing the above three steps, you will develop a plan the includes yourself and perhaps other people too. Each outcome you define will appear as a bar on the plan. So that you can see what this might look like, here is a sample plan:
Once your main plan is defined, you can use other Pathways features. Probably the first of these that you will want to use are the to-do list and calendar.
You will notice that there are some icons on the left of the above window, some of which have numbers beside them. Of particular interest to a beginning planner is the one marked number 3, which is the calendar tool. The one marked number 4 is the to-do list. These tools can also be invoked using function keys F3 and F4, respectively.
To find out about these and other features, keep reading!
Copyright 2004 by Arthur de Leyssac. The Pathways Planner software is distributed and supported by Freelance Wizards Incorporated (Canada).