Can't Grok, Won't Grok

  Here’s a little tip that I thought I would share. One of the key things with our money makeover is to avoid surprises . We do this in a number of ways, we create a new budget each month , we have our emergency fund 1 and allocate savings for upcoming/possible events. However, I still found I was getting caught out – why? Because it’s very easy to just plain forget about events that aren’t as big as Christmas or the next vacation. There are also instances when you get those sneaky 5-week months and you forget to budget an extra weeks groceries and whatnot. So how do we normally remember such events? Well duh, a calendar ! Overview Here’s what I do: Create a new calendar called “Budgeting” on Google * (see below for instructions) . Add all recurring financial events, whether it’s things coming off of a credit card, direct debits, travel costs or whatever. Using a digital calendar normally makes this very easy and with most of the options we would require for financial st...

I just wanted to share with you a small moment of clarity I just had.. I have a pretty long commute to work (2 hrs door-to-door), so I spend 4 hours of my day getting to and from work. By the time I am home, I can feel pretty tired, so often – mess accumulates over the week and I deal with it at the weekend. Unless I have a busy weekend. In short, I have been living in a tip for the last week, every day I have been coming home and looking at the mess and thinking “oh man, that is going to take ages to sort”. Well, I have recently been working on getting my geeky/productivity mojo back, so I got up this morning, made a list of things I wanted to do, and started getting on with it. 1 pomodoro later (25 minutes), the mess was gone - I had allocated 3, yes three . I kind of sat back while on my 5 minute break thinking “wow, I did all that in 25 minutes, that’s nothing !” – Well, 25 minutes in this case was everything it took to get that job done. The moral? I have just reminded my...

This was a first for me – I’ve done several installs of Windows 7 from USB key before, yet this time was different… For some reason, I was prompted with “ 1234F: ” – that was it, when booting from the key. Think this is because the MBR may have gone screwy because I tried to use the key in the 360 (as extra storage). Anyway, turns out, you need to press “ 1 ” and the setup will resume as normal… Thought I would share this in case others experience it. :)