The five stages of financial health

Finances is one aspect of laziness that I haven't yet talked much about. It is however tightly woven together with how we manage our lives in general. I mentioned in an early post on this blog that when I'm emotionally unbalanced I tend to make poor financial decisions. Self indulgence becomes easier and more tempting and I come up with all sorts of justifications. When I feel better I tend to be more frugal in my spending. But it goes both ways. When I'm in a good place financially I tend to be more balanced as a person. Keeping a tight rein on my expenses is one way of beating my lazy side and it in turn makes me feel better about myself.

Financial problems on the other hand make me nervous, stressed and emotionally unbalanced, which then in turn increases the amount of poor financial decisions etc. It all turns into a vicious cycle.

So how do we describe our financial situation in a way that helps us determine what to do to better it? Finances are a complicated matter after all.

A short article by Pinyo on Moolanomy.com describes five "Stages" of financial health along with some advice for how to handle each stage.

Quote from the article:

Last night, I was pondering the subject of cash flow (essentially how money flow through our hands) and about financial well being. I played around with various visualizations that consist of income, expenses, debt, and assets. What I came up with was the 5 stages of financial health below.

I believe that all of us go through these stages at one point in time, although some may never fall into “the debt spiral” or achieve “financial freedom”. Below are the description of each stage and some suggestions on how to improve your finances if you fall into that particular category.

Entire article here

After reviewing the article I concluded that I'm currently transitioning from stage 2 to stage 3. I will probably remain there until the end of summer when going back to school will force me back into stage 2. All the more reason to be frugal now. Money saved now might in turn save me from trouble during the school year.

Clutterers Anonymous

The other day I happened upon a site called Clutterers Anonymous. No I wont be joining any supportgroups just yet. My clutter problem isn't that out of control. It was interesting however to take their 20 question quiz. Here it is, including my answers to them:

• Do you have more possessions or items in your life than you can handle comfortably?

- No not really

• Do you find it difficult to dispose of many things, even those you haven't used in years?

- Yes sometimes. I usually have a hard time shaking the feeling that I might need it again in the future.

• Do you rent storage space to house items you never use?

-Thankfully no. If it was that bad then I would sign up for the support group this instant.

• Do you spend time looking for things that are hard to find because of all the clutter?

-Disorder makes it hard to find study material I need to go back to.

• Do you find it easier to drop something than to put it away, or to wedge an object into an overcrowded drawer or closet rather than find space for it?

-Yes!

• Do you collect things to give to others?

-No

• Do you bring things into your house without establishing a place for them?

-Yes

• Is your clutter causing problems in your relationships?

-No, but that would require a relationship. (For the single females out there I'm single and looking!) still I haven't had clutter ruin anything in the past.

• Are you embarrassed to have visitors because your home is never presentable?

-Yes. This is a recurring problem for me. Though sometimes I invite people over in order to force myself to deal with the clutter.

• Do you hesitate sharing about this problem because you are ashamed of your cluttering?

-Well I am writing this blog am I not?

• Are you constantly doing for others while your own home is out of order?

-Yes and no. Not to a large extent but to a degree I am much more inclined to help someone else then to take care of my own mess.

• Do you miss deadlines or abandon projects because you can't find the paperwork or material to finish the work?

-No I generally force myself to find what I need and finish on time. At whatever cost.

• Do you sometimes get buried in details, making projects take much longer than is really necessary?

-Thankfully this is not one of my traits.

• Do you procrastinate about cleaning up because you believe you must do it perfectly or you won't do it at all?

-To some extent yes.

• Are you easily side-tracked, moving from one project to another without finishing any of them?

-Yes

• Do you have problems with time management and estimating how long it takes to do things?

-Sometimes yes. But it depends on the project.

• Do you believe there is all the time in the world to clean your house, finish those projects, and read all those piles of old magazines?

-Regretfully yes. I always think I'll have time "later"

• Do you use distractions to escape from your clutter?

-Yes definitely. I'll frequently kill tons of time at my computer when I need to do things about my clutter.

• Have you tried to clean up from time to time but find yourself unable to stick with it?

-Not really unable per se, just unwilling.

• Does the problem appear to be growing?

-No thankfully it is more or less on the same level. Slightly less actually


There, not so bad right? Right? Actually according to the website I would be a prime candidate. So how many of these apply to you? I'll have a poll up this week. Post your score in it an we will see how we are all doing.

Relevant links - 2008-05-19

Can you become a creature of new habits? - Learning habits can actually make us more creative. Not learning new habits can cause our existing creativity to atrophy.

Learn an instrument online - A short article suggesting a few ways to learn to play an instrument with the help of the web.

Slate's special issue on procrastionation - Slate magazine deliveres a couple of days worth of articles about procrastionation. Have a look and see what can help you.

Top 10 interview mistakes - Some of these are downright crazy but some can be quite helpful. Make sure you don't ruin your next job interview by making any of these misstakes.

Sleep deprivation is NOT a badge of honor

Sometimes we get the idea into our heads that sleep deprivation is a sign of how hard of a worker you are. We imagine a scenario that goes something like this:

Person A - "I didn't sleep very much last night, I was up finishing up ." Person B (thinking) - "Wow what a hard worker! He needs a raise."

Now in reality this never happens. In fact according to this article on Signal vs. Noise you are more likely to loose productivity, creativity and controll of your temper when suffering from sleep deprivation. From the article:

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

...to think you can do with 6 hours or less is probably an illusion. Worse, it’s an illusion you’ll have a hard time bursting. Sleep-deprived people often vastly underestimate the impact on their abilities, studies have shown.

This lesson is to myself as much as anyone else. The 6 hour sleep cycle is all to familiar to me. And just like the article said I keep rationalizing and imagining to myself that I'm actually fine after 6 hours of sleep. So time to get to it and start getting to bed before 23:00.

Seven things Bruce Lee can teach you about getting your life in shape

He is fast, extremely agile and none of us want to get on his bad side. But he wasn't all about fighting (as awesome as he was when he did it.) I recently stubled upon this article on The Positivity Blog about 7 fundamentals Bruce Lee can teach us about life. My favorite point is number 5:

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”

I guess thats something I struggle with. I care too much about other peoples expectations of me and less about my own. Enjoy!

Clutter: Attack of the giant baby

Merlin Mann writes about his experiences of having a baby and trying to stay ahead of the clutter. A really good article describing a situation that we may all be in at some point or other (for me its still in the future).

Oh my, the stuff. The baby stuff. Everywhere. Means of conveyance, swingy seat, Bumbo, squeaky toys, fuzzy toys, toys for biting and bending, jammies, jackets, socks hat do and don’t look like shoes, amusing hats, blankets, books, rattles, pacifiers, cleaning supplies, extra diapers — plus of course, there’s the raw tonnage of stuff belonging to the caretaking adults that has been displaced or disused as a result of the occupying baby’s needs. It is a scene, man, I can assure you. And there’s not an iota of blame to place on the actual baby; it’s all us (and mostly me). [By the bye, for an illuminating look at the perils of the creeping ParentCrap industry, have a look
at Parenting, Inc. It’s chilling. And, for me, personally damning.]

He talks about his present problems and solutions as well as providing a handy list of previous excellent articles on the subject (It was his articles that got me started on this whole GTD thing in the first place.) Read the article here

Review: RememberTheMilk.com

Imagine having a way to manage all your to-do items. Sort them by date, place, project or other defining attributes. Imagine having access to this list where ever you are without using up all the free space in your calender or struggling with complicated synchronization procedures etc.

Well it's possible. Today I stumbled onto a web application that completely changed how I work my lists. Its called Remember the Milk. It is as close to GTD compliant as any application I have found to date. And is by far the most hassle free web interface for the task.
(GTD = Getting Things Done. A methodology that I have described parts of earlier in this blog. Based on the book with the same name by David Allen. If you haven't read it yet then read it and apply it. You wont regret it.)
In keeping with the tradition of most web 2.0 applications it is currently Beta (GMail.com has been beta now for how many years?) but functionality wise it's solid.

I have to admit that I have been hesitant about web apps. Its hard to get a decent work flow going in a web browser and keyboard shortcuts are non-existent for the most part. I have tried out other web based solutions for managing tasks in the past but most of them have been too clunky, too restricted or too slow to encourage me to come back and use them on a regular basis.

So I'll try to describe my experience with Rememberthemilk.com (RTM) out of a GTD point of view.

1. Catching tasks. First things first. RTM manages tasks. Nothing else. So you will still need your physical GTD system. Whenever you think of a task you can use a number of ways to enter it into the system.

• You can e-mail the task to a specific @rememberthemilk.com adress and have it automatically added to the inbox.
• You can go to the RTM website and find the appropriate list and enter it there.
• You can use one of the many external plugins available for different devices like the iPhone or windows mobile (requires a Pro account) or you can go to m.rememberthemilk.com from your cellphone and add it that way.
  
• You can install it into other web 2.0 services like various google services or twitter
• You can add it using various third party desktop applications such as plugins for Quicksilver and Dashboard for Mac or Deskbar and Avant-window-navigator for Linux.
• If you live in the US or Canada and you are utterly deprived of an internet connection at the moment you can even call a Jott number and add it by voice.

Everything you add, where you haven't specified otherwise, ends up in the Inbox. From here you can move it to any list.

2. Lists. Every task is on a list. Either on the Inbox list or on some list of your choosing. To add lists you have to go to the RTM website in a full internet browser and go to settings. This makes it somewhat uncomfortable to use in GTD. But on the other hand defining projects should really be done when you have some time set aside for it, such as during the weekly project review. To use RTM for GTD purposes each list can represent a project.

3. Tags. But we don't always want to sort by project. Say you are stranded somewhere with only a phone and some time on your hands. You might want to bring up a list of phone calls that need to be made. RTM lets you Tag every task with multiple tags which can then be sorted. So tag all needed phone calls, regardless of project, as "phone" or "to call" or some other tag of your choosing. You then go to m.RTM.com and sort on you chosen tag and voila! its all there in front of you (if you were smart you added the phone numbers in the list as well)

4. Locations. A neat feature is the ability to define locations in a Google maps interface that you can then use to sort your tasks by. These are similar to tags but are used more as locations then anything else.

5. Reminders. RTM can send you reminders in a number of ways. It can send you an email, an IM, or even send reminders to your cellphone (Only for specific providers in each country. I cant use this as I have the wrong cell phone provider) You can set reminders for the same day as the event or at specific times before the event.

6. Collaboration. RTM lets you share tasks with other users. I havent yet tested this feature so I wont write more then that about it.

As you can all tell I'm still in the honeymoon phase with this web app. No doubt RTM will irritate me in the future because of some unforseen shortcoming. It is nowhere near the perfect GTD app. But its closer then anything I have ever tried. But why take my word for it? Get over there, sign up for a free account and see for your self!

The challenge to unplugg

Information technology is a wonderfull thing. It's a miracle of communication and collaboration. Some of the most fantastic things come out of the fast networks of digital communication and their ability to unite efforts and spread knowledge. I't all very wonderfull... and addictive!

Often we dont fully realise exactly how dependent we have become. The best way to find out how addicted you are to digital communication is to unplug for a day. No phone, no computer, no videogames etc. Take a sabbath from all those things. Its a lot harder then you think.

Mark Bittman of New York Times wrote a great article on his experiences with unplugging.

I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

The entire article can be found here.

Introducing: My random life!

Today marks the launch of my new blog! For anyone who wants to know more about me and my twisted mind I will be keeping a more personal blog over at michaeldundee.blogspot.com. Don't worry, I will still be keeping this blog and keep updating on my war on lazyness. For now, have a great sunday night!

Keeping it Short and Simple

Often things in life seem overwhelming. Sometimes it is because we have overloaded our platter by taking on too much at once. Other times we seem to feel overwhelmed by less then others seem to be able to run with easilly. Why is that?

I believe we often make things appear more complicated and bigger then they really are. I cant be sure about this but I think its residue from our schooling, where a longer text was taken more seriously than a short text. Where the more complicated and wordy the thesis, the more respect it commanded. Of course this isn't entirelly true, quality of the work is also a major factor, but it's no coincidence that business men who write about running businesses and professors and doctors who write textbooks are in two vastly different division as far as number of pages go.

My impression is that in the academic world there is a constant competition for tenure where it mostly comes down to: "Ha, ha. My latest publication was thicker (and therefore better) than yours! I'm the better Doctor/Researcher/Professor." Now I know that I am probably being very unfair with that statement and do apologise to anyone I might have offended.

What I'm trying to say is that people who are successfull in business, who are successfull in managing their own lives all understand the art of Keeping It Short and Simple (KISS, or as some would have it: Keep It Simple Stupid.) What does that mean in everyday terms? When you get an asignment to do something you might feel overwhelmed because a tiny part of you is still stuck in that academic mindset where quantity trumps all. So you feel like you have this huge task that has to be done better than anyone else.

What you need to do is take a few deep breaths and take a step back. Then look at what you actually need to accomplish. What is the minimum that has to have happened to be able to call the task done? Then break that down into simple steps to get there. List all the demanded material, the demanded competence and then start looking at where you can find it. Maybe someone else has a skill that makes them more suited to do part of the task. Se if you cant outsource that part to them etc. etc. The bottom line here is to keep things simple. Complicated != Better.

No one will reward you according to the amount of work you put in. They look at the result and reward you accordingly. How you came to that result is not interresting to them. So why not do it the simplest and most efficient way possible?

Well in order to not be a hypocrite and make this an overly long post I will end here for now. Good luck out there.

Review: qOrganizer 3.1

Welcome to a new section of my blog. While working with personal habits and productivity we use a lot of tools. Some of these are software tools. There is a vast array of different software for different platforms that are supposed to help our productivity, but how good are they really? I will occasionally bring up a software title here and express my experience with and opinions of it. Since I am an avid Linux (specifically Ubuntu) user most of the software I review will be found on that platform. If you havent already given Linux a try I suggest you do. The days of it being a complicated system fit only for computer nerds are long gone and who knows, It might just prove to be what you have been looking for. (If you are going to try out linux I suggest you get one of the more user friendly distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva or PCLinuxOS, though the last one doesnt have a lot of support) Now onto the review:

qOrganizer 3.1
qOrganizer is a simple little lightweight program that has a lot of promise but isnt really there yet. Despite it being version 3.1 it has a few glaring omissions that make it not reach up to its full potential. But I'll get to that in a second.

1. Installation
Like most Ubuntu software install is a basic click and run affair. It can be found using the Add/Remove programs option in the main meny, if however you want the latest version you need to get online and look for it. The latest version can be had at the project website. However the website isnt very userfriendly and might put of the not so tech savy. Lucky for us it can also be found over at getdeb.net. Download the file, doubleclick and click install. Couldn't be simpler.

2. Features - or lack thereof

Calender view
If you are running Ubuntu you will find qOrganize under Application > Productivity. When starting the application you are greeted by the calender. This view (as can be seen in the included image) includes a basic monthly calender view, an event list and a journalpage. Its simple enough to use. You pick a date in the calender and then type in any scheduled events that day and add any notes necessary on the journal page. Now here is my first and most major beef with this program: Thats all you can do in that view. I like to have my calendar constantly accessible, which is why I use an online calendar (specifically Google Calendar.) Most calendar applications will allow you to automatically synchronize with various online calendars, not qOrganize. The events are of the extremely simple type. So forget about recurring events and multiday events. The journalpage does however redeem the calender a little as I haven't found any good equivalents in any of the software I have previously used.

To-do list
The to-do list view if fairly simple and straight forward. You type in your task, deadline, priority and how far along you are. The procentual gaude of progress is decidedly more flexible then the usual checkbox, but its clear that the person who developed it isnt familiar with the action centric way of doing things. The gauge is better fitted for the project level, and that brings me to my next complaint: What about categories? There is no way to asign tasks to categories (or projects if you will) this makes any to do list become a mess as there is no way to sort your tasks by location or project. And again exporting or importing to and from an external source such as an online list or a PDA is impossible. There is, in the settings, a way to synchronize with an FTP server, but if you don't have one of those you are SOL.

Timetable
The timetable view is my first clue as to what kind of people have been developing this software and for what market segment. What you have is a fairly standard 5 day school schedule. My guess is that this is where all recurring events go. In their defence you can add and take away any columns you like and reformat it into any kind of table you need. Still, the lack of any ability to download a weekly schedule from a centralized location tells me that this software is not geared towards the enterprise or even the college student. For someone in juniour high or high school on the other hand, it might fit the bill.

Booklet
This view is sort of a tell all. Here the student can keep track of all his absences and marks. I dont think any further treatment is necessary for our purposes.

Other Features
For being such an incredibly simple piece of software it decides to become very advanced when it comes to storing the info you add. It gives you re options of Text files, MySQL and SQLite databases. I'm guessing that if your school does have a central database accessible by FTP then these options might come in handy, but for the lone user wanting to keep track of things in his/her own life this feature is fairly useless. There is no help feature but then again I didnt come across anything that was even remotely complicated (other then the posibility of using databases and FTP)

Summary
As you might have guessed I initially had high hopes for this application. It looked like it might do a good job but it dissapointed me on every count. Any shortcoming it has might have been mitigated if it would have had a plugin interface but it does not. You might say that with this software what you see is what you get, literally. There is no depth in functionality at all. So unless you are a highschool student looking for a way to keep track of your classes you might as well move along. The only redeeming feature is the journalpage, which other programs could do well to take after. I give qOrganize 3.1 a score of 2 out of 5.

Procrastination

Months ago I promised to eventually write an entry on procrastination. Well I have procrastinated long enough and have now finaly decided to face my procratinating demons and write something. The Wikipedia entry on procrastination starts with this paragraph:

"Procrastination is a type of behaviour which is characterised by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite procrastination as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination

Procratination can also be seen as an attempt by the procrastinator to lighten the immediate workload by putting off work to a later date. This is proof of the fallability of our minds as procrastination, while slightly decreasing the current workload, dramatically increases the percieved and real, future workload.

On some level we all know this and this knowledge makes us go into a spiral of self loathing and stress whenever we start procrastinating something. This causes us to shy away from the whole subject of the procrastinated task since even approaching the subject causes all the guilt and anxiety to float to the surface. So we keep putting it off, thinking that someday we will have time and energy to deal with it.

In the mean time under the surface the guilt and stress keeps growing and expanding. Every once in a while some of that guilt reaches the surfaceand we are reminded of the thing we have been procratinated. The surfacing stress and guilt however, while reminding us, also overwhelmes us causing us to, in a kneejerk response, push it back down.

Eventually a deadline of some kind approaches and we are forced to digg the task up and get it done. So there we are, the night before deadline, digging our way through our own guilt and stress, now with an added flavour of panic, doing the best we can with the limited time left in a panicked frenzy of work, all the while wowing to never procrastinate again. But we all know we will.

So how do we get out of this cycle of procratinating thing? Like with anything awareness is key. The answer to the question why we procrastinate may also contain the recepie for beating it. Lets look at what has been written on the subject:

John roth over at www.getrichslowly.org writes this on the subject:

"I am a procrastinator. I always have been. It’s a character flaw, and I admit it. I’ve tried all sorts of things to beat the habit — Getting Things Done, e-mail reminders, dozens of list systems — but the only thing that seems to work is to:

Do it now."

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/09/20/getting-to-now-how-to-beat-the-procrastination-habit/

Never underestimate the power of Doing it Now. In earlier posts I have mentioned the benefits of doing now.

1. You still have a clear Idea of the size and scope of the task. As the procrastination routine progresses the task that is being put of tends to grow and transform in the mind of the procrastinator. While the task is the same it is now percieved as imensely larger and more complicated then it was originaly.
2. No drama attached. There is no guilt or stress attached to the task, the latter assuming you used good judgement and only accepted tasks you could reasonably be expected to be able to do. As you procrastinate the guilt and stress increases and blocks your progress.
3. No time to back out. The mind can sometimes be quite independent and it is my belief that we are all slightly schizophrenic on some level. It we simply go from thought to action imediately then we have no time to talk ourselves out of it. If we wait then the internal comittee meeting on the relevance of the task and if we shouldn't go do something else will start. If we let this discusion go on in our minds the majority will shift towards not doing the task, causing procrastionation.
4. Define the task. Nothing causes procrastination faster then having a nebulous undefined task that we know will take up a lot of time but we dont quite know how to get started with. Break it down. Not the whole thing but the beginning. Do you need some reading material to get started? Then make that the first task. Any smaller task that leads to getting the bigger thing rolling is good.
   

What if you are allready trapped in a procrastination cycle? Deadlines are coming up and you havent quite gotten started. What to do? Merlin Mann over at www.43folders.com has this to say:

"My favorite tonic for procrastination—which I have mentioned in passing previously—is what I call a dash, which is simply a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time"

http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/08/kick-procrastinations-ass-run-a-dash

Bring in point 4 from above, define a smaller task, then do it. Dont worry about working a very long time. Give yourself a lifeline, like a 10 minute timeframe or a certain unit count (I will read 15 pages in that book. I will spend 10 minutes sorting through my old bills.) When the time is up or the pages have been read you might feel like continuing. Go ahead! Knock yourself out! But dont feel guilty if you after 10 minutes decide to move on to other things, you gave yourself that option to make the task seem bearable and shoud not feel bad for using it.

This is in no way an all encompasing treatment of the subject of procrastionation, but it is a few pointers. (And I'm afraid that if I would give an all encompasing description you would be bored out of your mind reading it) Good luck in fighting procrastination everyone!