I’m continuing to work on increasing my productivity by implementing some basic systems. Last week was a huge success. I accomplished about twice as much as normal with roughly the same amount of effort.
A weekly planning session where I choose a primary project and distribute it’s tasks throughout the week. Previously, I was rather haphazard about choosing which task to work on, so projects tended to drag on with only occasional progress.
My primary project for this week is to create a monthly budget with You Need A Budget.
FWIW, You Need a Budget (YNAB) is great. Definitely give it a few months though. And be sure to connect it to your accounts (just like Mint, read-only, it’s safe). Yes, it is great to get into the habit of entering everything manually - and you have to for cash. But the online connection helps immensely if you forget something. I’m at 1.5 years now and the difference has been HUGE. My ability to budget before was terrible and YNAB has saved my butt. Budgeting used to be last minute - now I’m months ahead and finally saving.
Also a huge fan of YNAB, been using it for just over a year now and it’s literally changed my life.
However, I’d argue against linking your accounts. If there’s anything that I forget, I catch it in my weekly reconciliation process, which is yet another good habit to build (doing a weekly review of spending, adjusting budget categories, etc).
To each their own I suppose! But the account linking just makes it slightly easier to not keep awareness of your transactions, which is against the point for my purposes.
I’m continuing to work on increasing my productivity by implementing some basic systems. Last week was a huge success. I accomplished about twice as much as normal with roughly the same amount of effort.
The new additions this week are:
My primary project for this week is to create a monthly budget with You Need A Budget.
FWIW, You Need a Budget (YNAB) is great. Definitely give it a few months though. And be sure to connect it to your accounts (just like Mint, read-only, it’s safe). Yes, it is great to get into the habit of entering everything manually - and you have to for cash. But the online connection helps immensely if you forget something. I’m at 1.5 years now and the difference has been HUGE. My ability to budget before was terrible and YNAB has saved my butt. Budgeting used to be last minute - now I’m months ahead and finally saving.
Also a huge fan of YNAB, been using it for just over a year now and it’s literally changed my life.
However, I’d argue against linking your accounts. If there’s anything that I forget, I catch it in my weekly reconciliation process, which is yet another good habit to build (doing a weekly review of spending, adjusting budget categories, etc).
To each their own I suppose! But the account linking just makes it slightly easier to not keep awareness of your transactions, which is against the point for my purposes.