Grant's Space

What do avoiding car accidents, being on time, and successful inventory control all have in common?

Buffers.

People aren’t precise. Everything we do has a margin of error. It’s cool and movie-like to drive as fast as your mind, and car, can handle, or run in the door just in the nick of time for something important; but in the real world, chances are that you’ll get pulled over, or hit something, or arrive at the important event just after it started (or 30 minutes late).

There are natural limits in the world: the fastest your car can go, the fastest your mind can process information, the actual time the meeting starts, the actual amount of toothpaste in the tube. If you pass those limits, it’s too late: your car breaks down, you hit something you didn’t expect because you didn’t see it, you’re late for your friend’s performance, or you run out of toothpaste.

There’s an easy way to have those things almost never happen: set a different limit, and treat it as your actual
limit. Drive around the speed limit (you’ll notice other people are doing it too). Stay 2-3 seconds behind the car in front of you. Stop at the yellow light (it’s a buffer, btw). Have an unopened tube of toothpaste in a drawer. (When you need to open it, add “toothpaste” to your shopping list.)

The difference between your limit and the “hard” limit is a “buffer”, or a layer that protects you from the hard limit (just like those yellow barrels on the freeway stop you before you hit the hard cement wall). The buffer means you won’t get a red light ticket (or accident), or a speeding ticket, or run out of stuff.

You can also apply it to car maintenance (avoid breakdowns), your checking account balance (avoid overdrafts), and on and on.

You’ll find that once you’ve relieved the pressures of pushing the limits in mundane areas, you’ll suddenly have time, and mental freedom, to spend on more exciting things. This might take some getting used to, as you’ll have a void of time and thought to fill. Then you can push the important limits: your fears, your comfort zone, and why you’re spending time on this earth.

1. Join mint.com
2. Check it weekly and visit the “Fitness” tab
3. Do what it says

I love Mint (and hopefully Intuit won’t kill it). The automatic view of your finances is great because it’s so easy, the reporting and tracking is decent, the budgeting has “rollover”, and it has a personal financial management tutor built right in.

I like “rollover” because it lets you set up buckets of money for certain things, versus unrealistic hard-set monthly budgets that you’ll never really keep to (because some months you’ll spend more, some less).

By far the best feature is the Fitness tab. Mint makes money by making you money. Good system. The Fitness tab gives you step by step tasks (with points!) to do to make money, complete with a “why do this?” button for each. If things like checking your transactions weekly, spending less than you earn, getting an interest-earning checking account, saving for emergencies, and putting money into a retirement fund aren’t obvious for you (and even if they are), Mint’s Fitness tab will make you money. If you do all of them, no matter what your income is, you will probably become quite wealthy. I’d guarantee it if I were a betting man, but betting men rarely get wealthy.

How

1. write a list of stuff you use
2. tag it (use post-its, sticky dots, whatever). This makes it easy for you to identify what you need without taxing your brain, and lets you tell friends, 1-800-get-junk, etc, “don’t touch anything with a dot”.
3. get rid of everything else
   • categorize into sell, give away, trash, and keepsake
     • sell stuff worth more than $10-$20
     • set your own threshold here – what’s your time worth to sort, list, ship (or meet someone who is picking it up)?
     • give away anything that’s decent or useful to anyone else
     • anything you don’t use but can’t bear to get rid of is a “keepsake”. Arrange to store it somewhere (in a storage area, not in bookshelves, the floor, etc – get it out of your way). After your first few purges, you’ll want to revisit your keepsakes, because lots of it is probably really stuff you need to purge but have an emotional attachment to.
     • “throw away” anything that’s left. 1-800-got-junk is good if you have a lot of stuff, as it’s fast and they’ll try to recycle or donate anything they can (so you don’t have to feel bad about getting rid of things that could be useful to someone). Or, toss it yourself.

Why

You don’t realize how much that clutter is distracting you. Every item you have is a weight of some sort: mental, emotional, physical, etc.

For example:

• A friend gave you that planting pot. You haven’t put a plant in it in years, and you don’t do well with plants anyway. It takes up space on the coffee table, so it uses attention, because you see it and it takes up space (mental weight). You can’t just throw it out because you’d feel bad, both because it was a gift and because someone might be able to use it (emotional weight).
• your couch is in daily use, but if you wanted to, say, move downtown, you’d have to move it (physical weight).

Multiply that by all the items in your house (every book, every piece of paper, every plate, every towel, every piece of furniture, etc) and you have a lot of weight that you feel, but are so used to that you don’t even realize you’re carrying it.

Consider:
What if you wanted to travel through Europe and Asia for 2 months. You’d have to pay your rent at home, adding say $3000 to your costs (assuming $1500/month rent). You say “of course, I need a place to live”. But you’re not living there, your stuff is. You’re paying $3000 so you don’t have to move your stuff. You’re used to that limitation, because you’re used to carrying the weight.

Once you start getting of stuff you really don’t need, several things happen:

1. You feel “lighter”. You’ll see the open space in your house. Clear surfaces, room to move across the floor, etc. You’ll notice the decrease in mental distractions.
2. You want stuff less. Once you realize that the smallest item requires maintenance, a place to be, a purpose, and to be disposed of at some point, you won’t want to even take the free pen some comapny offers as swag.
3. You become free. You’ll want to purge everything you can, because without the stuff to maintain, you’re free to do what you want, where you want.

How to move a 2-bedroom apartment in 4-6 hours and be unpacked and settled in at the end of the move (really):
http://www.mang.canterbury.ac.nz/people/jfraffen/misc/moving1.htm
(see below for extending this to include packing)

If you’d rather pay someone to do it:
Pack/Move/Unpack companies:

• http://www.la-movers.com/Los_Angeles_Movers.html
  • Corporate movers. No mention of residential, but my house is more like an office anyway…
• http://www.ozmoving.com/california/
  • May be new. Web site not finished yet.
    1611 Perrino Place
    Los Angeles, CA 90023-2624
    888-665-MOVE
• http://www.navlagent.com/executive/house.htm
  • Corporate&Residential. Storage too. In Anaheim.

These are from my notes from the research I did for my impending potential move. The companies above (I believe) do full relocation – that is, they pack your old place, move your stuff, and unpack into your new place. Corporations use services like this to move their employees – you’re unpacked and settled in the day you move in. I got tired of taking days hauling things around in my previous moves and knew there was a more effective way to do things – hopefully they’ll help you too.

I have a huge house to pack, so I added the following steps to enable people to pack too:
- List areas to be packed
  - Break them down by units that can be packed in small boxes in about 15 minutes by one person
- Write up list of friends to invite to moving party
- Write up instruction list for packers:
  (Note: I wanted to enable people to sort out items that really shouldn’t be moved/stored – you may want to drop that part and just have them pack everything)
  - Get 3 boxes and a plastic bag.
    - Label 1 box “give away/sell”
    - Label 2 boxes with the name of the area you’re packing and types of items in it (you may need more boxes depending on their size and number of items in your area)
  - Go through each item in your area sorting items into each box.
    (note: you may want to drop this sorting, or update the criteria to match your needs)
    - If it’s “worth keeping”, put it in the box for the area you’re packing
    - “Worth keeping” is defined as being more valuable than the amount of storage space cost and effort to pack, move, and unpack.
    - If it’s not worth keeping, but someone might want it, put it in the “give away/sell” box
    - If it’s trash, put it in the plastic bag.
- Write text for invitation for packing party
- Get enough boxes to accommodate the areas on the list
- Get a bunch of plastic garbage bags for trash

Hope this helps.

If you’re like me, your “to-do” list is more like your “to-don’t” list. There are certain things I just hate doing, like paying bills, sorting snail-mail (ever wish there were spam filters and mail rules for snail mail?), and doing certain little random tasks (like getting the debris from the remodel two years ago out of my garage).

On “accounting day” (when I paid bills, etc), I would be in a reeeeally bad mood, to the point that I had to learn to not answer the phone or I’d be mean to the caller, no matter how close a friend. I realized something had to change.

So, I implemented a new system: I figured that I could handle 15 minutes of bill paying a day. I was right. It’s amazing what you can do in 15 minutes a day. I just stack the incoming mail on my desk and have a special email folder for incoming bills (“your online statement is ready”, etc). I wrote up 2 lists that are taped to the wall in front of my desk: One shows the “process flow” (order in which I do things), the next shows a list of bills, how they come in (mail versus email), and what needs to be done with each (needs to be paid online, send an online payment through my bank, auto-paid, etc). (I printed the lists not because I like paper, but because it makes getting into and out of the 15 minutes very easy – nothing to find or open, just sit and start).

Process flow looks like this:

1. Paper Inbox (stack on desk)
2. Incoming Bills email box
3. Download Bank Statement into Quicken
4. etc…

So, at the start of my day I just sit down, note the starting time, and start with the first thing on the top of the stack. When 15 minutes is up, I stop and get to more important things. (Maybe you want to pick a time after work instead .

The system’s worked so well that I added a second 15-minute chunk to my day (mine goes right after the “accounting” chunk): The to-do list. This is very different from the to-don’t list. Items on this list get “processed” in order during that 15-minute chunk of time. I’ve made a covenant with myself: During that 15 minutes, I’m in what I call “execution mode” (’cause I’m a nerd) – I do not think about the list, I just start at item#1 and start processing. Doesn’t matter if that processing is just taking inventory of the crap in the garage – it’s the first step in the task, and after 15 minutes I stop. Next day if the task is still there, I continue it. Of course the other side of this self-covenant is that I carefully think about what goes on the To-Do list. It’s actually a separate list in my calendar named “To-Do”. There are other “to-do” lists on my calendar too – things that are good ideas, might be good to do, etc go there. But when something gets to the To-Do list, it’s special. It will get done. And it does!