During the month of May and the first half of June, I kept a time diary. Several times throughout the day (as often as possible, in fact), I recorded how I had spent my time in as much detail as possible, without judgment, and saved all of these notes. After allowing a couple months to

As I’ve mentioned before, I was able to create, launch, and build up The Simple Dollar during my leisure time in the evenings after work over a two year period. Simply put, I filled much of my leisure time with this site, day after day, week after week, month after month, until it had built

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years. 168 hours? That’s the number of hours in seven days – a typical week. The premise behind this book

Tom left a great comment on the recent article about taking care of your things: How can you fight off “I’ll do it tomorrow”-ness? My lack of motivation makes me lazy, even though I see the benefits of not being like this. Procrastination is a big enemy of financial progress. It’s easy to say “I’ll

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series. I cover time management quite a lot on The Simple

One common question I’m asked a lot is how we actually balance our work lives and our family lives. Barb sums it up best: How do you do it? You write tons and tons of stuff for The Simple Dollar, your wife works a full time job, you seem to have tons of time available

As I’ve mentioned many times before, I start off every day with a pretty full to-do list – usually numbering twenty items or so. On a good day, I’ll accomplish most of them – write a few posts for The Simple Dollar, answer email, check the comments, handle some correspondence, work on another writing project,

If you’re anything like I am on this historic day in the United States, you’re probably sitting frenetically on the edge of your seat, looking for exit polls and waiting impatiently for the first election results to roll in. I know I’m certainly there – I’m such a big politics hound that the presidential race

As longtime readers certainly know by now, I like to post articles rather regularly on the subject of time management. I’ve reviewed a small mountain of books on the subject (Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything, Do It Tomorrow, Leave the Office Earlier, and Find More Time were the best among these) and written dozens

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. Cut to the Chase was recommended to me by a friend of a friend, who swore up and down that it was the best book on time management he’d ever read. As a long-time believer in Getting Things Done (and having read

Perhaps the most frequent question I’m asked is how on earth do I find the time to do all of the stuff that I do in a given day? I thought the best way to illustrate this would be to give an outline of a typical day so you can see what I do during

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or personal development book. Over and over again, I’ve come to realize that most of the stress and money management problems that people have come down to one thing: a lack of time. It’s because of that realization that I’ve come to write somewhat regularly about

My wife’s extended family is of Norwegian heritage, and the entire family loves eating lefse at large family meals. The only problem is that preparing an extended family sized batch of lefse takes several hours, so they all chip $10 or so together and buy three or four pounds worth of the potato pastry from

Over time, many, many readers have asked me how I keep myself organized and find the time to maintain The Simple Dollar, work a full time job, handle a family life that involves two kids in diapers, and have any free time at all for other pursuits including some degree of intellectual curiosity. It’s not

Following a recent post describing twenty three weekend personal finance projects, a discussion emerged about whether some of the projects were cost-effective given the time investment. 1mil made the following comment: Wouldn’t it be more worth your time to do something that had the potential to get you more money than you are saving by