LifeHacks: Personal Productivity At Its Best

For those starting 2015 with resolutions like myself, I figured it would be a good idea to share an important lesson/lifehack from Warren Buffet. Here's the story.

One day Buffett went up to his pilot named Steve and jokingly said to him that “the fact that you’re still working for me tells me I’m not doing my job.”

“You should be out going after more of your goals and dreams,” Buffett reportedly said.

To help him with that, Buffett asked Steve to list the 25 most important things he wanted to do in his life.

Then Buffett asked that he review each goal and choose the five most crucial ones.

After considering a moment, he drew circles around five fantastic goals, confirming with Buffett that yes, indeed, they were his highest priorities.

And the rest?

“What about these other 20 things on your list that you didn’t circle?” Buffett asked. “What is your plan for completing those?”

Steve knew just what to say.

“Well, the top five are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in at a close second,” the pilot said. “They are still important, so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit as I’m getting through my top five. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them dedicated effort.”

Buffett suddenly turned serious.

“You’ve got it wrong, Steve,” he said. “Everything you didn’t circle just became your ‘avoid at all cost list.’ No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top five.”

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Mint.com

This is an online financial management tool. You can access it computers, tablets, phones, almost everything. It's really useful for budgeting, and coming to grip with your finances, and it is completely free.

PROS:

It's free, and requires no software to install on your computer.

When you connect it to your financial institutions, it will automatically download each transaction you make every night and log it into your ledger.

It's very visually pleasing and streamlined to help you budget.

It will send you email alerts of bills due, weekly summaries of your finances.

It even recently added a free credit score tracking feature.

CONS:

Lots of advertisements. The whole reason it is free is because you get targeted ads based on your financial information.

A lot of people have noted the automatic downloads have glitches or problems syncing up is another big problem.

You also can't reconcile it with your bank statements, because they assume the data that is downloaded is always correct. Nor can you import old history of budgeting from anywhere else.

The transactions downloaded are automatically categorized, requiring a manual override quite often.

Not a lot of customer support or personal backups of your budget.

YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary):

Security: While the institution that owns Mint.com has a good history of protecting financial information and customer data, the fact remains that you are now putting all your login information for your banks, loans, credit cards, etc. in one place. It's a huge potential security risk, although it hasn't happened yet. If you trust Intuit, it's very useful.

The other thing that seems to give me mixed feelings is the automation of your budgeting information. 6 months ago, I had to take control of my personal finances, and I used YNAB to take control of my finances. The main factor that helped me was manually entering in my transactions from bank statements of personal reciepts. I would have to confront the money I spent every few days to enter it, rather than ignore the bank statements. While some of the features of Mint.com would have helped a lot, that manual entry was really the key part that helped me, and it's not something here. 

PHONEBLOKS:

This is a really cool idea and something I'm 100% behind. Unfortunately, this was more of a social movement for concept product than an actual product just yet.

For the past few weeks, I've been struggling to get by at work and with several issues at home. I've also managed to find several good lifehacks to test out or just queue, but never the time to actually get the well-researched and finished product out.