Never again clutter your days and nights with so many menial unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!
- Og Mandino
Once you have decided to make a change and you have a plan, it’s time to act. For many of us (myself included) this can be the most difficult part of changing. Most of us really are pretty busy with work, family and all of the responsibilities that come with being an adult. It’s easy to tell ourselves that we don’t have time to look at our balance sheet, our bills, bank accounts and investment statements. Budgeting? Forget it. I don’t have time. The truth is, we make time for the things that are important to us.
Many of us learned the hard way during the financial crisis that it is important to understand what you are invested in and why. We might have lost a job and realized that we needed to buckle down and track our expenses. We need an emergency fund. These are personal finance basics that can soften the blow for us when things turn south, as they inevitably do from time to time. But the truth is that all of these basics do require effort.
If you’re finding it difficult to get started, try the following tips:
- Start Small: If the idea of tackling your financial issues all at once is too much for you, start with the smallest unit of action it takes to get yourself to actually do something. Try to do at least one thing, no matter how small, each day. Or plan to complete several tasks on the weekend or a day off. This might mean just getting out some paperwork, or looking up how much you usually spend on utilities each month. Ideally, as you move on, you will become encouraged to keep going as you learn more and more about your financial status and perhaps find some ways to improve it.
- Make Time: What activities could you give up in order to accomplish your goals? Would you be willing to forgo an hour or two of television each evening? Could you get up an hour earlier or go to bed an hour later?
- Keep Organized: Since you will not be able to accomplish everything in one sitting, make sure you keep your ideas and paperwork organized as you go. Have a file or two where you keep current projects and leave yourself a post-it note about where you left off and what your next tasks were going to be. This way, when you do have a few minutes to work, you won’t spend half your time trying to remember where you were. You can dive right in.
What have I missed? How do you get yourself started on a daunting task?
I think I get more accomplished when I’m in ‘flow’ –bunching or batching work, or keeping at a project for as long as I can. I use the post-it note method, too. Interruptions cause me to lose a lot of ground, but making just a one or two-word “trigger word” will help me get back into it without a lot of searching for my place. I also like to do things when they’re fresh. If I write a note on a marriage & family therapy session immediately, rather than the next day, my conceptualization of the problem is sharper and richer. And whatever I write is my roadmap for the next sessions–so it is doubly useful.
I think that must be true with money management– if you enter your expenditures or ideas in a notebook at the time, you would be far more likely to hit your financial goals. I personally like to use “mobilecheckbook” on my BlackBerry. It cost under $10 but makes it possible to enter receipts on the spot and I can view all my account balances (an unlimited number). I sound like a commercial, but it has improved my money management to be able to do this ‘on the fly.’ Oh, by the way, it also allows me to keep accounts in more than one currency (Yen and USD), which may be helpful to you.