Jørgen Emerslund

“Why can’t we all get along?” er et kjent spørsmål. Men et godt et. Hvorfor kan vi ikke komme bedre overens? I steden for å stå på våre bastioner, kan vi ikke heller se hva vi kan gjøre for å skape løsninger som er bedre i helheten, enn løsninger som er bedre for oss selv, som våre motparter ikke kan godta?

Skal ikke si så mye om GTD, annet enn at det er et knallsystem. Problemer som ting som skal gjøres som blir glemt, oppgaver man ikke får fulgt opp ordentlig, for mange ting som skal gjøres samtidig og lignende er kjent for de fleste. Man finner seg måter man unngår mange av disse symptomene, men det er egentlig ikke en behandling.

GTD er et rammeverk – alene får du ikke gjort en skvett mer enn uten GTD. Sannsynligvis bruker du mer tid på å skjønne systemet enn du liker til å begynne med. Men etter hvert kommer nytten frem som noen enkle regler for hva man skal gjøre med alle informasjonsbiter og henvendelser som kommer ila dagen.

Hovedpoenget er at alt skal fanges i en innboks. Innboksen kan være hva du foretrekker; enten en kladdebok, postitlapper eller spesifikke programmer som er lagt opp til å støtte GTD-systemet. Personlig bruker jeg Things, og har også brukt RTM. Hovedpoenget er uansett ikke hva slags system du bruker, men at alt kommer inn på samme sted, slik at man har et punkt man går til for å se hva som skal gjøres videre. Fra innboksen tar man for seg hvert punkt, for å se om det skal gjøres noe med, eller ikke. Deretter er det noe finsortering før man er ferdig.

Leo Babuta, en annen internettguru, har laget den lettere modifiserte versjonen Zen To Done, denne er forøvrig også vel verdt å sjekke ut. Stefanos Karagos har laget en fin fremstilling av hovedelementene i GTD. Jeg har ikke tenkt å lage en lang artikkel på GTD, men heller oppfordre deg til å sjekke ut dette systemet hvis du følte deg truffet av problemstillingene på toppen.

Uansett hva du gjør, ikke gap over for stort med en gang. Begynn med å få samlet ting på ett sted, så tar du det stille og forsiktig derifra.

Having financial problems – either in your business or in your personal life – isn’t much fun. It sucks out all your energy, and whatever you want to do after that you can’t afford. So, while it might not be a more fun alternative, having your finances under control is essential – and will without a doubt help you in the long run. I’m going to outline what I’m doing to stay on budget myself – this works both for personal finances and small businesses, but I’ll be taking the point of view of the former.

Budgeting

Don’t pretend you don’t need one. Sit down, and try to think of the areas where you spend your money. My categories are things as loan, food, entertainment and such – you get the picture. Remember to include a misc category – you’ll want to use this for all the things that don’t really fit in. Just make sure to keep track of these in some way – until you gain some more experience doing this, Misc might reveal the need for a separate category.

After you’re done, group these categories into regular expenditures, and variable. The clue – the regular ones are the ones you know are coming your way, that are easy to set aside money for. The variable ones are to a certain degree guesstimates. How much will I spend on food? Hmm… I’m guessing 300$. Might be more, might be less – don’t spend hours on that now. Tweak where you have some information, make some informed estimates, and move on.

Now, set this up for say – the next 12 months. Guess where you need to, and decide how much money you think you’re going to be spending in each category the next year.

Great – you’re done with your budget – for now!

Keeping score

A budget is useless without its sibling, the accounting. My way of doing this is to have a seperate worksheet where I have one column for each category. I have  each category summarized. Whenever I buy something, I keep the receipt, and at the end of the day, I enter the sum of each of these receipts in the worksheet. I have a worksheet that’s an exact duplicate of my budget worksheet, except without the budgeted numbers. At the end of the month, I copy all the sums from my daily tracking into this accouting worksheet, and I got the right numbers for that month.

Comparison

Now enter the dreaded cousin of the two siblings: comparison analysis. This is an identical worksheet to the other two, except that this one is comparing the numbers in the two others. In other words, how much did you make last month in your day-job compared to what you expected, how much in your freelancing gig, how much spent on food compared to expected, and you’re getting the picture.

Now, you can adjust your budget for the coming month(s) if your intial estimates were way off. Or you can adjust your spending if you can see what you were afraid of – that you spent far too much clubbing than you should have done. (Sobering, eh?).

With this input from yourself, you should be able to better identify:

• Where you should focus cost-cutting if you need to do that
• How much you can put aside for savings each month without acting like you’re broke
• When you can afford to make that investment in a Harly Davidson motorbike that you have always dreamt of
• …

Writing this, I can’t help to think of an article I came across, describing how some of Norway’s largest companies, including the goverment-controlled oil company Statoil, were working around the normal budget process. This kind of thing comes with the manditory warning: Don’t do this at home, folks – these guys are pros! Without the experience, and business processes of such tremendous companies, this is like stealing your own opportunities – might seem like a good idea at the time, but you’re going to get caught, and it’s going to hurt. Seriously – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

A lot of the concepts in this post is hard to conceptualize without help. Therefore, you will find attached a open office document that will work as a starting point for your own budget. Shared with a Creative Commons license – for everybody’s eyes only . And yeah, I would love some feedback on this – input, questions, requests for improvement etc.

Get the Financial Worksheet.

Photo: Jeff Keen @ Flickr