In the past two weeks, several people have written me asking how I manage to get my finances in order, work full time, maintain this blog, be a good father and husband, read two books and a few magazines a week, and not go completely crazy. While this isn’t strictly a personal finance topic, I often feel that putting effort into having a full and flexible life often helps me in keeping my finances and especially my life in great shape.

Here are ten things I do that enable me to stay productive day in and day out. Some of these may work for you; others may not. I do recommend, however, giving each one a fair shake - I give a few pointers for how you can take a baby step to get started with each one.

1. GTD - or at least a subset of it. If you’ve surfed around on the internet much, you’ve probably heard about GTD, a personal productivity philosophy. The concept was introduced by the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, and a lot of people are using it in various ways to organize their crazy lives. I’ll have an opportunity later on this site to wax ecstatic about this book (think books that changed my life), but I will say that for me, a simplified version of what he suggests works well. I use a checklist of tasks that immediately have to be done, and also have a notebook which contains all of my projects, one on each page. On each page, I have a checklist for each one that I go through. Every day or two, I scoop the next item for each project onto my main to-do checklist. This way, I’m always making progress on larger projects.

How can you get started? When you get home, make a list of stuff you’d like to accomplish this evening, then move through it as best you can. You don’t have to do it all tonight, just do as much as you can. Then take the list with you tomorrow and add things to it as you think of them. Eventually, it becomes ongoing, and if you start to latch onto this, Getting Things Done is really a good read.

2. If you start something, finish it Whenever I consider beginning a new task, I ask myself what the likelihood is that I’ll finish it in this sitting. If the answer is no because the project is huge, I try to break it down into pieces that can be accomplished. If the answer is no because of other time commitments (i.e., I only have ten minutes), I find something else to do. To me, a half-finished task is like buying something on a credit card and then not paying the whole balance - you’re going to burn extra time every time you re-start a task. So just don’t do it.

How can you get started? The easiest way is to practice breaking things down into small, manageable chunks, and then completing those small pieces.

3. Proper nutrition, especially vitamins and lots of water I take a multivitamin every morning religiously and most mornings I chase it with a bowl of oatmeal. Then, during the day, I drink six or eight glasses of water. I used to not do this, but since I started, I can’t tell you how alive it makes me feel. Plus, it makes me feel full, which helps me to keep my eating in check, saving both my health and my money.

How can you get started? Drink water every time you feel thirsty at all. Keep a water bottle near you. Also, eat more whole grains and also consider vitamins if appropriate.

4. Lots and lots of notes One problem I used to have was that I would come up with an idea, but then by the time I had an opportunity to look into it further, the idea would be gone from my head. I solved this by carrying around a small pile of notes with a clip and a pen in my pocket (a hipster PDA, sort of) and I just jot down everything I think I need to remember. Later, I go through the pile and piece through them to see what follow-up needs to happen on each one.

How can you get started? Keep a piece of scratch paper and a pen on you at all times, and use it to jot down ideas right when you have them. Then review the paper later.

5. Effective reading, not speedreading Whenever I consider reading something nonfiction, I usually do a thirty second “blitz read” to see whether it’s interesting: a quick skim of the article along with a few random stops in the middle to see if it’s of interest. If I’m not intrigued, I move on. It’s that simple. With fiction, I usually peruse reviews quickly to see if it’s of interest, but my fiction reading generally sticks with personal recommendations, major award winners, and short stories. Any “speed” I have for reading is mostly the result of practice, as I set aside some time each day to read lengthy items (i.e., things longer than a blog post).

How can you get started? If you read something and it seems pointless to you, don’t bother finishing it. You’ve got more useful things to do with your time than trying to dig through something that doesn’t enlighten or excite you.

6. Natural pick-me-ups When I get the afternoon or evening doldrums, I use a natural pick me up. For me, this is usually something citrusy, like an orange or a fruit blend and some water. I also spend a few minutes just walking at a rapid pace; I’ll get up and just stroll somewhere and come back in about ten minutes right after eating the orange. It’s also a lot cheaper than hitting the vending machine for an artificial pep like Mountain Dew.

How can you get started? Get some oranges and eat one when you start sagging, then go for a stroll to get the blood pumping again.

7. Elimination of distractions It wasn’t all that long ago that I would come home and vegetate in front of the television. Now, our television is rarely ever on; when it is, it’s on to watch a specific program or to obtain specific information (such as a weather report or a school cancellation). When that’s done, the television goes off and stays off. I don’t give myself the opportunity to even get sucked into something; I just leave the thing off and spend my time focusing on things that have a higher value for me.

How can you get started? Leave your television or your internet access (whichever activity is your favorite sedentary evening activity) off for a few nights and instead focus on doing other things that you want to do, particularly those things that require some investment of your mind. Mark a few things off of your list that you made with step one, read a book on a topic of interest to you, work on structuring your finances, or just write some nice handwritten thank-you notes to people. I used to wonder how on earth I would burn my evenings; now I have more ideas than I have time to do.

8. Sleep training I sleep about five to six hours a night. I stay up every night until I literally can’t keep my eyes open, and so my final half an hour is usually filled with tasks that I can do in a sleepy stupor - unloading the dishwasher and stuff. The big advantage is that I’m out like a light very quickly after my head hits the pillow.

How can you get started? The best thing I can suggest is to practice on the weekends a bit. Stay up until you can’t stay awake any more, then set your alarm to get up early and get up. Doing this on Friday night, then following it on Saturday works well.

9. Maximizing my time I try to utilize every second I can to do something worthwhile. The trick is defining what worthwhile is; I view playing with my son as worthwhile, for example, so every minute I do that is something fulfilling. This means I’ll read a newspaper article while I’m using the restroom, or I’ll listen to a book on tape while on my morning or evening commute. This means I practice my piano skills while holding my son on my lap (and he hits the keys between me), or that I plan out blog posts while waiting for someone else to tee off while on the golf course. I try to never let my mind rest unless…

How can you get started? Try listening to a book on tape during your morning and evening commute. Thanks to my local library, I’ve been able to enjoy a number of books this way.

10. Meditate Unless I meditate. I usually meditate for a half an hour or so directly after my evening commute, before my wife and son arrive home. I simply turn on some ambient music, sit, and close my eyes for a while without falling asleep. It’s almost like a brain reboot, and it’s incredible. After I’m done, I simply am completely ready to tackle whatever the evening hands me.

How can you get started? Turn on some quiet music (and turn off everything else) and just try to think about nothing. I usually imagine the small farmstead that I grew up on and how it made me feel when I was young. Then I just drift.

After the recent discussion of stay at home parenting and the stellar response that it received, it became clear that the question about whether to be a stay at home parent wasn’t so much about money as it was about values.

In most situations, sound personal finance choices are in line with typical goals, such as buying a home or saving for retirement. However, many people are compelled to make long-term value-based choices that have negative long-term personal finance ramifications. I know we are, as we piece through whether or not it makes sense to have a stay-at-home parent.

This realization made me think deeply about what the purpose of The Simple Dollar is and the value of what I talk about on here. So often, this site takes the bottom dollar and makes it king above all else: what maximizes your pocketbook. The truth of the matter is that personal finance isn’t an end to itself, but merely a tool to help you achieve your dreams.

Like any tool, personal finance can be dangerous if you don’t wield it correctly; giving a person without a strong financial backbone a credit card is like giving a two year old a machete. However, in the hands of a mature person, personal finance is a precision instrument that can be used to turn an unfinished dream into a beautiful reality.

In other words, personal finance decisions should complement your dreams, not replace them or fight them. When you make a choice, personal finance management is a skill that can let you know how that choice will affect many of your other choices. Can I really afford this? isn’t merely a money question; it’s a question of how important is this thing to your overall life in comparison to other things.

In the past, I’ve spoken of a “switch” that goes on for people when they suddenly “get it” and start kicking their savings into gear and start eliminating debt. That switch has nothing to do with money; it is merely a switch from focusing on short term goals like a new sweater to focusing on longer-term goals like owning a nice home and retirement. At the core, it’s not a growth in personal finance skills, it’s a change in goals and values that lead to a person trying out new finance tactics.

Whenever you read a piece of advice on this site, take it in the context of what’s important to you. When I demonstrate a way to save ten dollars, ask yourself whether this is a tool you can use to achieve your dreams. When I talk about building an emergency fund or buying a mutual fund, ask yourself whether this matches up with your true values.

Remember always that “finance” is the second word in personal finance; the first word is “personal.” Let your own goals and values lead the way whenever you make a choice, and use personal finance as a tool to assist in those choices.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

If you haven’t started up a 401(k) plan (if you’re an employee) yet, what are you waiting for?

Let’s say you make $40K a year and you’re twenty five years old, meaning you’ll retire sometime around the age of sixty five. Even if you just contribute 1% of your salary - less than $10 a week (and it’s employee matched) into your 401(k), it returns an average of 8% a year, and you only get a 4% raise a year, do you know how much you’ll have at age sixty five? $369,388. If you make that donation just 2.5% - still less than $20 a week before taxes, meaning only about $15 a week out of your take-home - and get the employee match, you’ll have $923,471 in your retirement account at age 65, just shy of a million bucks. In short, a 401(k) plan can add up to huge amounts of money - and it doesn’t cost very much, either.

Even more impressive is the fact that most companies offer a match for every dollar you put in. Quite often, this can go as high as 5% of your paycheck that they’ll simply give you if you put it into your retirement account. All you have to do is invest.

I don’t know anything about investments! Don’t worry about it. Put it all in a target retirement fund (something almost all 401(k) plans offer) and let them do all of the investment managing for you.

But what about the folks who got ripped off by Enron? Since that debacle, retirement plans have had new rules introduced that protect you from such a catastrophe - they’re not allowed to invest all (or even most) of your retirement plan into the company’s stock. In other words, even if your organization collapses, your money won’t just disappear.

Make the phone call right now to your organization’s human resource office and ask to start up a 401(k) plan, even if you know nothing about investing. Tell the person you just want all of it in a target retirement fund, which means someone else manages the whole thing for you based on when you’re expecting to retire. I’d recommend putting in as much as your company matches for starters, but as you can see, even a couple of percentage points isn’t bad.

If you found a $100 bill floating around, what would you do with it? It’s a question I’ve been asking a lot of people lately, and the answers seem to fall into two general groups. According to my notes, I asked thirty one people that very question, and here’s how they fell out.

Spend it. This is where perhaps 90% of the responses fall (28 of them). Their eyes immediately flash with the idea of getting a new gadget or a new article of clothing or a new pile of books or something like that.

Save/invest it/use it to pay off debts. The other three people I asked fell into this category, in which they used that money to build up to more money over time.

After asking that, I followed it up with another question: what if an uncle you didn’t know about suddenly left you $100,000 (after taxes) in his will? The answers changed quite a bit with this one.

Spend it. Almost exactly half of the people (15) would still spend it quickly. I heard answers like getting a great car, outfitting a home theater room, and other such things. One woman actually claimed that she would hire a maid.

Save/invest it/use it to pay off debts. The rest claimed that they would use all or nearly all of it to pay off debts, mostly their homes. A few who own their homes claimed that they would invest it either in improving their current home to sell it later or as a down payment on another home.

When I asked what the difference between the two situations was, most of the people said that $100 wasn’t important enough to really matter, so they might as well spend it.

To me, this response explains exactly why consumer debt is such a problem. People have become so trained as consumers that $100 no longer seems “important” to the average person, and thus it can be spent on consumer goods without guilt. Even more amazing, to some people the same philosophy applies with $100,000.

The parable of the ant and the grasshopper appears here: it’s always better to plan ahead when you can rather than act wastefully now.

What could be done with $100? It could be put into an emergency fund so that the next time your car breaks down, the pinch isn’t so bad. It could be put into an extra house payment, which would singlehandedly drop multiple hundreds of dollars from your final payment. It could be put into your child’s 529, making college easier for them. It could be put into your own Roth IRA. It could be another brick in building a secure future for yourself or your children.

Or it could be spent on something you completely don’t need.

Ask yourself: what would you do if you found $100? Does your answer make you feel happy - or does it make you want to make a change? It’s a question I can’t answer for you - you have to answer it for yourself.

I have a soft spot for books on frugality, so when I spotted America’s Cheapest Family on the new releases shelf at my local bookstore, I had to read it. Are there a lot of good ideas inside for how to reduce your financial footprint, or is it a bunch of self-promotion and hot air? This week, I’m going to dig into this book and find out whether it’s worth your time.

Chapter 6: Utilities - Shut the Door, Turn Out the Lights
The Department of Energy reports that the average American home spends 6%-12% of their gross income on utilities. That’s a lot of cash; even a 10% reduction in utility usage could save you 1% of your annual gross income. The chapter is split up into several subsections, each focusing on a particular utility: electricity, telephone, water, and so on. Most of them are great tips, but a few are kind of quirky: one family has a programmable thermostat that basically just turns on their central air at 5 AM and runs it nonstop until 9 AM, which is when the utility company raises the rates for the day to the higher daytime usage rates. At 9 AM, it goes off until the next day at 5 AM. During the day, they leave ceiling fans on to keep things as cool as possible, then in the evenings they cool off with a cold swimming pool or a cold shower. That’s one way to save energy!

Best tip in the chapter: Trick your toilet into saving more water by tossing a filled water bottle in the tank. My parents did this with a 32 ounce soda bottle. If you have a house with a lot of toilet users in it, this can save a substantial amount of water (multiple tanks worth over a day) and it becomes noticeable on the water bill.

Chapter 7: Debt - The American Dream Turns Into a Nightmare
This chapter features a nine step plan for escaping the debt monster. Here they are, in order:
1. Acknowledge the problem
2. Make your list and check it twice
3. Cut spending to a bare minimum (this is the tricky one, I think)
4. Put the cards away
5. Get more money (by selling stuff around the house you don’t need)
6. Earn more (ask for a raise)
7. The battle plan (like the debt snowball)
8. Communicate with creditors
9. The big payoff (plan a big celebration when you finish it)

Best tip in the chapter: If someone suggests paying for something by borrowing, just say no and wait. There is nothing in life worth going into debt for outside of education and a home. If you’re going into debt for anything else, you’re choosing to drown.

Chapter 8: Medical - Keeping Your Body Healthy and Your Wallet Happy
This chapter focuses on multiple ways to cut down on medical bills: good insurance (or at least knowing clearly what your insurance covers), prescription tricks, and preventative tips. I found the preventative tips to be the most interesting, but that doesn’t mean they pass for solid medical advice or that you won’t get sick. Mostly, it’s things like drinking plenty of water, keeping clean, and getting some regular exercise.

Best tip in the chapter: Ask your doctor for larger supplies at a time than just one month of a maintenance prescription; that way, you pay only one co-pay per period. I actually did this recently for a maintenance medication I take and my doctor wrote me one for six months at a shot rather than a month (probably because I’ve been taking it since I was two days old and he figured I wasn’t going to be stupid about it). This saved some decent money - but now I have a monster bottle on my dresser.

Chapter 9: Clothing - Looking Better, Spending Less
I really enjoyed this chapter - it offered a ton of tips for cutting down on clothing spending, from using thrift shops to avoiding items that need dry cleaning. They basically agree with my clothing philosophy: classic, basic styles that mix and match well, so you don’t need too many items to have a very diverse-seeming wardrobe. By the end of the chapter, I was ready to head out to Frenchy’s.

Best tip in the chapter: If you have kids and see an amazing deal on shoes that they won’t wear for years, buy them. When I was a kid, my folks did this once, buying a pair of Nikes that were no longer being made in 1982. I started wearing them in 1992; they had a ton of retro panache and they cost my parents two dollars more than a decade earlier.

Chapter 10: Entertainment & Recreation - Finding Fun for Free
This chapter is all about leveraging the free and cheap entertainment that’s all around you. The best starting point in your community is contacting town hall and asking for a community calendar, but this chapter is loaded with tons and tons of general ideas, like going on a hike, visiting the library, or doing some volunteer work. The thing that always amazes me about these lists is that they all seem like such common sense, yet so often I won’t even think of them when I think about entertainment.

Best tip in the chapter: Buy an entertainment book at the start of summer. At that point, they’re practically giving them away, but the coupons are all still good and you can do all sorts of stuff cheap during the summer, especially if you have kids who are now out of school for the summer.

America’s Cheapest Family is the seventeenth of fifty-two books in The Simple Dollar’s series 52 Personal Finance Books in 52 Weeks.

I’ve been on a kick recently re-reading some of my favorite novels of all. I just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for the fifth or sixth time and as I sat there thinking back on the book, I realized that it might be the greatest novel I’ve ever read. It might not have transformed my life like other books, but in terms of really making me sit and just reflect and absorb an amazing novel from beginning to end, this would be the one. If you haven’t read this novel, please think of giving it a shot. It’s amazing. Anyway, on with some personal finance posts.

A Reply To A Comment Journey to Freedom maybe shouldn’t be in the headline writing business, but the advice here is a good one. Look at the interest rates, people, not the overall monthly payment. Debt consolidations can lower your monthly payments, but if the interest rates are higher, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice over the long run. (@ journey to freedom)

Ten Reasons Why You Should Be An Entrepreneur Today This post got me to thinking about how entrepreneurship advice really applies to life in general most of the time. These are all things that a successful individual should work on, no matter what their employment situation. (@ money smart life)

Why A Bad First Job Is Good For You A great story that has a solid point, too. Can’t wait for future installments. (@ wise bread)

Many of my readers have reported to me that they enjoy my postings on cooking and they see how it can save some serious cash, but that most nights after a long day of work, they’re just too beat to cook a stellar meal.

I can sympathize. After a long day at work and with a toddler running amok when I get home, neither my wife nor I want to cook some nights. Here are our five best tricks for putting a warm, healthy, home-prepared meal on the table without much effort in the evenings.

Prepare meals in advance. Spend a weekend preparing a bunch of meals for you and/or your family that you can just pop in the oven after a long day at work. This works well if you have a large freezer, as you can stack covered baking dishes in there with the meals already prepared in them so you can literally start preheating the oven, pull one of these out of the freezer, toss it in the oven, wait for forty five minutes or so, and then have a delicious homecooked meal.

Discover the crockpot. Rather regularly, I’ll prepare a meal before I even leave for work for the day. I’ll just put all the ingredients in a crock pot, turn it on low, and when I get home a delicious meal is waiting for me and my family. If there is interest, I’d be glad to post a compendium of ten or so of our favorite recipes - basically, just toss this list of things into the crock pot, turn it on low, and leave.

Have regular “leftover” nights. If you work hard to prepare a meal one night, have it as leftovers a few nights later. Change the preparation a bit, add some more (or different) spices to change up the flavor a bit, and you’re good to go. My favorite trick is to take leftover spaghetti, pour it in a pan, put the sauce on top of it, put some mozzarella on top of that, toss a few herbs and spices on top, and bake it for twenty minutes. It’s delicious and quite a bit different than plain old spaghetti.

Use lots of items that require minimal preparation. There are lots of ways to do this. Get frozen vegetables that can be steamed in the bag. Eat high-quality whole grain bread with a meal to get your whole grains and cut down on preparation time. Serve whole fruits, such as grapes or oranges, along with the meal. If you use these suggestions, you can easily prepare something like a chicken breast in just a few minutes and have that be your only real task.

Eat extremely simple meals. When I was working almost full time and also a full-time college student, I used to prepare extremely simple meals for myself. One common one I liked was “poor man quesadillas” (a tortilla on a plate, some cheese on top of that, another tortilla on top of that, microwave for a minute, pour some salsa and a bit of sour cream on top - you can also use small pieces of chicken in there, too), a cup of yogurt, and a big glass of milk. It doesn’t have to be exquisite, just something that hits the major food groups.

Recently, I stumbled upon an interesting online tool called The Prioritizer, which basically helps you to make an ordered list of the goals in your life. Once I started playing around with it, though, I quickly found that it wasn’t much help unless you thought carefully about the things you put into it.

Given that, I developed a brief exercise that can really help you define what’s truly important to you and how these things rank in comparison to the other aspects of your life. This exercise should only take a few minutes and it might be quite interesting.

First of all, pull up a text editing program because you’re going to make three short lists.

The first one is what are your five long term goals? Try to identify things you’d like to accomplish ten years from now (or longer). Have a big nest egg? Buy a great house? Have a child? Get married? Own a Maserati? Think about it for a few minutes and try to think about things that are really important to you for the long term.

Next, what are your five short term goals? These are things that you can accomplish in the next two years, such as save up half of a down payment, have a child, get your degree, find a new job, or move into a new home. What’s important to you right now?

Finally, what were your last five unnecessary splurges? What were the last five things you bought that you didn’t need? Did you buy some clothes? A book? A computer game? A gadget? A DVD? What were these things? Make them at least a bit general - you don’t have to name the exact item.

Now that you have a list of these fifteen things, fire up The Prioritizer and enter these fifteen items in the list. Once you do this, The Prioritizer will begin pairing these items up and asking you which one is really most important to you. Don’t do this rashly - sit and think about each one for a few seconds at least and answer honestly. It might be that that new dress you bought actually is more important to you than buying a new home in ten years, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Once you’re finished, The Prioritizer will give you a nice long list of how all of these things actually rank in your life. Print off this list and think about it for a while; you can even fold it up and put it in your pocket and remember that every time you let a lower priority eat your money when a higher priority could really use it, you’re not living towards what is really important to you.