What Brat Factor Planner Can Help You Do If you're new to Brat Factor Planner, it includes these features specifically to help you and your brat get things done (and have fun): The Brat Factor System. Based on the proven S.H.E. (Sidetracked Home Executives™) system used by FlyLady™ and millions of disorganized people since 1977, the Brat Factor adds something new to the mix: working (and playing) with your inner brat! Because as Pam Young says "If it isn't fun, it won't get done!" Brat Factor Planner includes most of the S.H.E. tasks already built in, so all you need to do is customize them and add specific tasks of your own. Industrial-strength reminders. Let's face it - getting places on time is a challenge because life is full of distractions! And Time is so inconsistent: one minute there's plenty of it and the next minute – late again! (As the old song says: "Who knows where the time goes?") When you're distracted or bored or just plain harried, a single reminder (or two) is NOT enough. Brat Factor Planner lets you set as many reminders as you need for any task or appointment, starting as far ahead of the due date as you need them – so you'll remember birthdays and anniversaries and deadlines in time to do something about them! Here is an example of reminders you might set when you have a dentist appointment. The reminders come up one day before, one hour before, 30 minutes before, and 25 minutes before your appointment:                Spoken reminders. What about when you're not in front of the computer? With Brat Factor Planner, you can make the computer speak reminders - using either a computer-generated voice or you can record messages in your own voice! And if you put in some wireless speakers, you can hear the reminders all over the house! Here is an example of a wake-up reminder from the computer. (Click the speaker icon to hear a computer-synthesized voice): And here is an example of a wake-up reminder with a home-recorded human voice. (Click the speaker icon to hear the home-recorded human voice): Launch linked programs. When we get involved in something on the computer, it can be hard to switch focus to another activity. And honestly, the basic pop-up reminder is small enough to ignore. To deal with this, Brat Factor Planner lets you link a file or program to a task reminder: the file is either launched automatically or when you click the reminder pop-up. This lets you make GIANT full-screen reminders that cannot be overlooked! (Make the "reminder" in a program like Word, and then link the Word file to your reminder.) This is also how you play those vocal messages you recorded! And you can use it to launch music or bring up a webpage or ... Here is an example of a GIANT reminder - the "before" screen (surfing the net): And here is the screen after the giant reminder: Manage your brat as well as your time. Awareness is the first step in managing your brat. The Brat Factor Planner helps you become mindful with the On-Track Reminder. The default On-Track Reminder message is "Who's in charge right now?" so you can check to see if it's you or your brat! Once you've gotten used to checking in with your brat, you can put in a different message to remind you what you want to be doing or to help you get back on track if you've gotten distracted. (Example message: "It doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to be there") Project trees. We creative, right-brained people prefer to see "the big picture" view of a project - but we also need to know about the details which we might otherwise overlook. Brat Factor Planner has a tree view for projects that lets you put in the branches (subtasks) in a project. And project trees are great for making detailed checklists which you can save and reuse. Note: When you move your mouse over a task, you see the full name of the task and any notes you may have written about the task in a yellow pop-up "tooltip." Reuse and share Brat Factor Planner files All the software planning programs that we know of have an underlying monolithic design which is fundamentally different than Brat Factor Planner. In the other programs, all of a person's data is in one file, and it is not intended to be shared. In contrast, Brat Factor Planner has a modular design. There are several advantages to this approach: You can have separate Brat Factor Planner (.bpf) files for different aspects of your life. For example, you might have all your work projects in a file called Work.bpf, and keep your home stuff in Home.bpf. You can run more than one instance of Brat Factor Planner concurrently. This means you can have Work.bpf in one instance of Brat Factor Planner, and Home.bfp running in another - both running at the same time, each with its own reminders! You can save individual projects as reusable "template tasks." (This is how the S.H.E. tasks are saved - and it's especially helpful for checklists.) And note that a template task can be used with any .bpf file on your computer, not just the .bpf file where it was saved. When you add a task to Brat Factor Planner, you can include information about the task in the Notes field, such as a phone number, directions to the place, etc. Questions or Suggestions? Contact Us! If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments, please email us at BFP@wolfinthemoon.com. We'll post answers on the Support page, reply to you directly, or both.