General Requirements Statement for QII personal planner:

Coherence: It will allow you to check easily whether or not the priorities you have set your tasks at is consistant with your personal goals.

Balance: It will let you achieve a balance between the different roles you play in life, such as that of a father, and that of a bussinessman.

Quadrant II Focus: It will help you (through another of Covey's tools) determine what should be allotted time, and how things should be prioritized.

Flexibility: It will allow you to adjust for emergency situations easily. Rescheduling is a simple matter.

Portability: It will be portable, allowing you to refer to it often, and keep in mind what you need to spend your time on.

I think Quadrant II Focus may need a little more explaination, but the others are fairly self explanitory. Covey uses a "quadrant diagram" to help determine what to spend time on. On a pair of axis, one labelled Urgency, and the other Importance tasks are plotted. He contends that those tasks which are Important but not Urgent should get the most time. This will keep you from having to spend all your time on things that are Important, and Urgent in the future. This will give you more flexibility in scheduling.

We will attempt to meet these requirements by providing the following:

• Multiple Roles, and Related Goals. This is the feature that will allow for Balance to be incorporated into our planner.

• The ability to prioritize various things will be related to the Quadrant diagram. This ensures Quadrant II Focus.

• The ability to prioritize Roles either by time devotions, or by rating. This feature allows you to create your own balance, instead of all Roles being equal.

• The ability to relate Tasks to Goals and Roles. This will ensure that the balance set up by the Role prioritization will not be corrupted by errant tasks.

• The ability to prioritize Goals within Roles. This give you the computer an idea of how to schedule things for you.

• Setable policies. This is one of the more vague abilities we will provide. It quite possibly will incorporate nearly all of our five requirements. This needs to be discussed more thoroughly in class.

• A good output format. The output will be a print out similar to that in the book, either on paper, or on screen. The paper version will satisfy the portability aspect of our requirements.

• A scheduling algorithm. This algorithm by whatever means will, once all tasks for a particular week are entered, assign them times or days.

• The fact that the schedule is kept as computer data makes it inherently flexibile. Any changes that can be made, can be made quickly, and at a minimum of effort, and if a change cannot be made it will be imediately apparent.

• Coherence is a semantic aspect, and cannot be controlles, or guided by a computer, coherence will be an aspect that is up to the user. The computer will however enforce the assigning of tasks to Roles, or Goals, which may point out incoherencies.