One of the biggest personal and professional frustrations that I have (and that a lot of others seem to share) is that there’s never enough time to get to the important things we want to do. We want to do things like… + visit an old relative + create a master information document + work

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity, personal development, or career book. If you’ve been reading my weekly roundups for long, you know I’m a big fan of the Unclutterer blog and its chief writer and editor, Erin Doland. I link to Unclutterer frequently because I believe there is a strong connection

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development, career, or entrepreneurship book. Knowing how to be a leader – and using that skill from time to time – opens doors for you no matter what you’re doing in life. It helps your career. It helps your social standing. It creates a positive reputation

Melinda writes in: You constantly write about how having a notebook in your pocket all the time helps you in life and saves you money. I get that you can write down your ideas in it all the time, but I’m not a creative type. I don’t see how having a notebook on me at

Three years ago, one of my mentors was debating internally about how to handle a personnel situation. There were enough funds to employ one person. The performance of one worker was better overall, but the other worker often showed flashes of brilliance and was trusted more by his coworker. In the end, the decision was

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity, personal growth, career, or entrepreneurship book. The brightly-colored cover of this book caught my attention on the “New Releases” shelf at the library. I picked it up and read a bit of the first chapter – a story about a girl left alone in a

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein In response to my recent article, Are Poor People Lazy?, where I concluded that laziness doesn’t always equate to poverty and vice versa, Pamela left this comment: There are many factors that lead a person to the life they

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development, personal growth, or career book. Over the past several months, I’ve reviewed a lot of books about entrepreneurship, building relationships with others, and climbing the career ladder. All of these techniques have one thing in common: they require you to stand up for yourself and

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I

I’ve seen it over and over again: the person in the office with self-confidence is the one that gets the plum assignments. The promotions. The raises. The recognition. The others, who sit back quietly, get left behind (and sometimes resent it). For a long time, I was one of the resentful folks. I had a

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I

Over the past week, my wife, my children, my parents and I all went on vacation to the Dallas/Fort Worth area (we had planned a longer road trip, but we made an on-the-fly decision to just stick around DFW). While there, we visited family and saw a large number of sights and events in the

A few years ago, I first read David Allen’s seminal book on time management, Getting Things Done (here’s the skinny on what it’s all about). To put it bluntly, it was an epiphany for me. Let me make it as clear as possible: without the insights from Getting Things Done, I would have never found

All of us have things we don’t want and, at the same time, want or need other things. Usually, the transition between the two requires selling what you don’t want and buying what you want or need – but often, you lose value on both transactions. A better solution is bartering – exchange something you

Over the last few weeks, quite a few readers have written to me asking about Angel Food Ministries. I’ve been very hesitant to discuss Angel Food Ministries on The Simple Dollar for a handful of reasons, but this is clearly a topic that many readers are interested in hearing about, so I’ll do my best

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book. Rich Like Them by Ryan D’Agostino follows in the tradition of The Millionaire Next Door and The Difference: it interviews a large group of millionaires in order to figure out what traits they have in common. Rich Like Them takes this tactic and runs

After reading my recent article about cooperating with your neighbors to share resources, my always-sharp wife Sarah made a great point. “You know, we have a perfect example of this at work out in our yard right now.” And she’s right. Here’s a picture of it. The play equipment above sits exactly on the property

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development, personal productivity, or career book. At almost every job I’ve ever worked at, from a minimum wage service job where I helped people print documents to a full time job in a research lab, creativity and initiative have been rewarded. A person who is a

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development, personal productivity, or entrepreneurship book of interest. Whenever I see clutter, I see money lost. For one, the clutter itself is usually made up of unused items that have value. Books, decorations, games, DVDs, and so on – they all cost money to purchase and