Priorities

The first way it is possible to make a to-do list better is to add priorities to the list.  If you can separate what you want to do from what has to be done you are further down the road to being more productive.  Another way that you may want to mix priorities into the mix is to decide what is also urgent and what is not urgent.

Contexts

Some productivity systems use the idea of contexts to help them be more productive.  They divide the to-do list into actions that can be done in a certain spot.  Some examples of this are a list of everything you can do on the computer, or a list of all telephone calls that you need to make.

When to Make Your List

I believe that the best time to make your list is during your weekly review.  I like a big list for a week, and then during my daily review is to pick three big things and two small things to do.  Some people like to make a list daily.  I still suggest it being about three big tasks and two small ones.

The task list has potential to be useful, but it can also stop being useful in a few ways.  First, if you do not use any type of prioritization on your list it will not work for you.  Second,  it is possible to go overboard on the prioritization, or contexts and create a list which is unusable.  It is a balancing act to create a list which is usable to you.  Color can be a useful tool for making tasks of different priorities or contexts standout.z

Making a budget

A budget is simply the balancing of income and expenses.  The first thing to do is to determine the facts about your income.  At the very least you need to know your take home pay.  If you want you can calculate your gross pay and payroll taxes.  Once you have your net pay it is time to list your expenses.  List out all of your expenses.  Now you have your plan.  I suggest checking your account balances once to three times a week to make sure things stay on track.  Unexpected things can happen in a checking account quickly.

Tracking Your Spending

The next part of the process is to track your spending.  I know of two good ways to do this.  One is to keep all of your receipts, and regularly review them.  The other is to keep a notebook of your spending, and to regularly review the results.  These two methods are not mutually exclusive either.  If you spend a dollar a day on a soda, you may want to eliminate it or reduce the expense.  As you find these areas to save you can redirect resources to other areas.

Refining Your Budget

As you find money you can save cut expenses or life changes you need to update your budget.  Using the right methods you can reach your financial goals.

Budgeting is the first step in taking control of your financial life.  Keeping it up is hard but worth it.  There are many ways your budgeting efforts can be derailed, but if you start again eventually you will be successful.

Financial Values Inventory

Circle the item from each pair which most appeals you:

• Housing (Dream Home/Vacation Home)
• Retirement Savings/Investments

• Education: Self/Others
• Vacation/Travel

• Retirement Savings/Investments
• Hobbies/Sports

• Social Activities/Eating Out
• Car

• Education: Self/Others
• Housing (Dream Home/Vacation Home)

• Personal Appearance/Grooming/Clothes
• Car

• Retirement Savings/Investments
• Hobbies/Sports

• Hobbies/Sports
• Car

• Housing (Dream Home/Vacation Home)
• Vacation/Travel

• Vacation/Travel
• Church/Charitable Giving

• Hobbies/Sports
• Church/Charitable Giving

• Vacation/Travel
• Personal Appearance/Grooming/Clothes

• Church/Charitable Giving
• Social Activities/Eating Out

• Housing (Dream Home/Vacation Home)
• Retirement Savings/Investments

• Hobbies/Sports
• Housing (Dream Home/Vacation Home)

• Church/Charitable Giving
• Social Activities/Eating Out

• Personal Appearance/Grooming/Clothes
• Vacation/Travel

• Retirement Savings/Investments
• Social Activities/Eating Out

• Education: Self/Others
• Car

• Personal Appearance/Grooming
• Education: Self/Others

Now Total the Number of Times You Circled Each Item

Car ________
Charitable Giving ________
Education ________
Hobbies/Sports ________
Housing ________
Personal Care ________
Retirement ________
Social ________
Travel ________

Now rank each of the totals from most to lowest. This indicates your financial values.

Money Attitude Worksheet

1. Listing all your debts including their interest rate, amount owned, and how long they have left.
2. Deciding an extra amount to pay on the debts
3. Laying out a repayment plan.

Gathering Your Information

The first step to making a debt elimination schedule is to list your debts. When you list each debt record its current balance, the minimum payment, and what the interest rate is for the debt. For example:

*For Example Only

I have created a List of Debts form you can use for this, or you can create your own.

Choosing an Extra Payment Amount

Consult your budget, and come up with an extra payment amount. This is a set amount you are going to pay on this pile of debts above the minimum payments. You may need to cut back on some non-essentials to come up with this payment amount. What ever it is it will help you to get rid of your debts quicker.

Laying Out a Repayment Plan

Creating Your Repayment Plan starts by amortizing each of your debts. Amortizing lets you see each payment through the life of a debt. You can add that magic extra payment and see how it shortens the payoff time. Do that for the debt with the shortest time to payoff. Amortize each debt, and list its series of payments. When you pay off the first debt add its minimum payment to the extra payment of the second debt. As you pay off the debts keep adding their minimum amounts to the extra payment of the next debt. Use my Debt Elimination Schedule to track all the payments for all your debts, and use my Amortization Schedule spreadsheet to create your payment schedule for each debt.

Good work on making a plan to get out of debt. As I have worked my debt payoff plan and paid debts off my wife and I have found that there is less stress, and more happiness in our lives. I hope this helps you as well.

Net Worth Analysis

To find where you stand conduct a net worth analysis.   In a net worth analysis you line up everything that brings money into your life, and everything that takes money out.  If you own more than you owe you are in a good place.  The items you own are your assets.  What you owe are your liabilities.  List your assets down one side, with their values.  Do the same for the liabilities.  Subtract the two and if you have a positive in favor of assets you have a positive net worth.  Either way you know where you stand.  I have created a Net Worth Planner form for you.

Making a Debt Elimination Plan

After you know where you stand a common wish is to eliminate debt.  Debt can be accrued from a variety of sources.  Some debt is long-term, some debt is short-term.  Debt always has an interest rate, a time to pay off, and a payment amount.  The first thing to do is to list out your debts, and record the current balance, interest rate, and time to be payoff time.  Here is a List of Debts form.

After you have listed your debts the next step is to create an amortization table for the debts.  An Amortization Table lists the current balance, and then shows the payments needed to pay it off.  I have created a planner form you can use for this.

Now that you have your payment series you can look enter them into a Debt Elimination Schedule.  A debt elimination schedule is a payment plan that lists all of your debts and an extra amount, which some people call a snowball, but the idea is to pay off your debt with the shortest time early, and then to pay off the next debt by adding the amount for the payment from the previous debt into your current debt.  Keep it up, and you will pay off your debts sooner than you would have otherwise.

Budgeting

The last step of the Keep-It-Simple Finances system is to keep a budget.  In The Richest Man in Babylon many good ideas for sound financial management are taught.  I urge you to read it, and decide which of its precepts you can or want to incorporate into your budget.  Here is a Budget Sheet for your planner.  Another tool to help you with your budget, and taxes is to use a Receipts Envelope to keep track of your spending.   Do not expect your budget to be perfect from the start.  Things come up, and budgets get thrown off, but if you know where you stand you will know what needs to be done.

• I feel more invested in the system.
• I get a more customized system than I otherwise would.
• When a system stops working for me I can put a new one together quickly.

Investment

Being invested in my system helps me to engage and use it. One of the reasons why I build my own systems is so that I know it is mine. It is not some expensive set of papers that I am afraid to touch. My first productivity system was based around an expensive planner. I did not do much with it at first, because I was to afraid to touch it. My way around that problem was to create my system.

At first I did not know what to do. I needed a new system, and I could not afford to buy one, so I looked around, and I discovered DIYPlanner.com. This site opened my eyes to the idea of making my paper based productivity system. I also found that feeling of investment with the completion of that system.

Customization

A custom system allows me to make changes, adding or removing as I need to. I like trying new things as additions to my systems. Papers, cards, pens. Early last year I even tried a system based around an iPad.

System Failure

When I have job changes, or major life changes I find that my systems fail. My solution is to stick to The Middle Way Method, and create a new productivity tool. I can usually create a new tool in a weekend.

Creating your own productivity system will help you to be successful with your efforts to be more productive. When your efforts get hung up you can give yourself a fresh start.

What are the rules of a good productivity system?

How to Create a Productivity System

I have two blogs, this one, and my bookkeeping blog.  I use FeedWordPress to bring my Bookkeeping and Accounting posts to this blog.  I want everything I write to end up here.

Blog Posts

Getting automatic updates going out to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ for blog posts is easy with Twitter and Facebook Google+ is a little harder.

For Twitter I installed Tweetly Updater into my blog.  I gave it my Twitter Profile.  Now when I create a new post, or update a post a Tweet is created letting my followers know about the new or updated post.  I only use it on this blog, because an update goes out for the posts which come in to this one from my other blog.

For Facebook I use the Facebook app RSS Graffiti.  I use RSS Graffiti in two ways.  The first way is that I have a page for each of my websites.  I use RSS Graffiti to bring in my posts to their respective pages.  The second way I use RSS Graffiti is to create staus updates on my main profile from this site.

For Google+ I am still working on a solution.  I am feeding my blog posts to a Blogger Blog, which is integrated with my Google+ Accounts.  To get the posts into the Blogger Blog I use Bloggers blog by email address and I used FeedMyInbox to send my Feed from this site to the Blogger blogger blog.  From there I hope to be able to use Blogger’s integration with Google+ to accomplish my goal.

Social Media Integration

For social media integration I found Google+ to be the best place to start.  I made a circle in Google+ and I added the post by email address from my Facebook account.  I then went over to TweetyMail and signed up for their free plan, which includes 100 tweets a month.  Now when I post to Google+ I use the circles I want, and add my Social circle.  I check the send by email box and post.

There is one caveat for this to work, you can not have any e-mail addresses in your circles you do not want to send emails to.

Finally I have linked my Tweets to my LinkedIn Profile, and I continue to look for ways to grow my web.

The Richest Man in Babylon is a series of stories.  The stories in the book are:

1. The Man Who Desired Gold
2. The Richest Man in Babylon
3. Seven Cures For A Lean Purse
4. Meet The Goddess of Good Luck
5. The Five Laws Of Gold
6. The Gold Lender Of Babylon
7. The Walls Of Babylon
8. The Camel Trader Of Babylon
9. The Clay Tablets From Babylon
10. The Luckiest Man in Babylon
11. An Historical Sketch Of Babylon

In The Man Who Desired Gold we meet two men who are not as well off financially as they would like.  They decide to ask a successful friend of theirs, who is the richest man in Babylon to teach them to be more successful.

What I learned from this story is to seek advice from those who are successful.  Find a mentor, or teacher.  Wisdom can help us not make as many mistakes as we otherwise would have made.

In The Richest Man in Babylon we learn how Arkad became wealthy.

The Lesson from this story I found was:

• Save a part of all of your income.

In the Seven Cures For a Lean Purse the king of Babylon asking the Arkad to teach others to become rich, so they can teach even more.

The lessons I learned from this story were:

• Save a part of all your income
• Control your expenses
• Invest wisely
• Guard your money from loss
• Make your home a profitable investment
• Insure a future income
• Increase your ability to earn.

The next story is Meet The Goddess of Good Luck.  We get a discussion on luck, and chance.  The result of the discussion is the lesson from this story:

• When we take action we are more likely to be lucky.

The next story is The Five Laws of Gold.  This is the story of Arkad testing his son about being able to be wealthy.  He is given a tablet with the five laws of gold his father had learned, and a bag of gold.

The lessons I learned from this story were:

• Save 10% of all your income
• Money will multiply when invested wisely and securely
• Find a mentor to help you invest wisely
• Invest in businesses you are familiar with
• If an investment looks to good to be true it usually is

The next story is The Gold Lender of Babylon.  This is the story of a character gaining a bonus for excellent work, he is asked to lend his money, which is equal to 50 years of savings to let his brother-in-law go into business.  He has doubts, and so he turns to his friend who is a money lender.  The lessons I learned from this story are:

• When we are doing well financially there will always be people who want to share what we have.
• Sometimes when we want to help another person we end up only hurting ourselves.
• The safest loans to make are to people with more assets than the size of the loan.
• When emotions are involved lending or borrowing money is not a good idea.
• It is better to be cautious than to have regrets

The Walls of Babylon is about how the Walls of Babylon held back invasions.  The lesson is:

• Do not be without adequate protection

The next story is The Camel Trader of Babylon.  This is the story of a man who started out financially ok.  He then lost his finances, and took on debts.  Then he hit bottom, but found the determination to pay off his debts.  The lesson learned is:

• A way can be found if there is determination

The Clay Tablets of Babylon tells the story of how the camel trader paid off his debts.  What I learned was:

• Save 10% of Income
• Live on 70% of Income
• Pay debts with 20% of Income

The Luckiest Man in Babylon is the story of a man who was sold into slavery to pay his brother’s debts.  He found a way by working to earn money to buy his freedom.  He made a friend, and inspired him.  After that when he was seized again his friend bought his freedom.  Together they became successful, and he is trying to teach his friend’s grandson how to work.  What I learned is:

• Work hard, there is no substitute.

An Historical Sketch of Babylon gives a cultural and historical background to the stories.