Start Managing Your Money! (An Example of a Personal Financial System)

A few years ago, when I started receiving my first few paychecks, I remember casually asking my elder sisters: “How much should I save?” And their resounding answer was: “As much as you can!” I’ve often kept that moment in mind whenever making financial decisions. I hope you noticed that since I had to ask this when I was already earning, money wasn’t a usual topic of discussion when I was growing up. My parents almost never talked about it except to remind us to save. I still try not to think about it, but even then I knew that it was something that I had to keep myself on top of. So, I decided to create a system that would allow me to control my inflows and outflows without too much complication.

Again, I must emphasize that I’m no financial expert, so this post won’t tell you what to do with your money. Instead I’ll try to share with you my system as an example, and a simple one at that. I’ve been using it for the past three years, but I’ve been planning on redesigning it soon. Nonetheless, it has served me well and has done what I’ve needed it to do.

Hopefully, this leads to some adulting geoscientists to take their money matters more seriously and at least give them some idea of how to start. And if I’m doing something wrong (that I’m unaware of) hopefully someone more experienced can kindly point it out.

My system

First, my system requires tracking all my expenses. Because of this, I prefer to use an app on my phone, which I bring with me wherever I go. In my app, I have four “virtual wallets” or accounts which I use to separate my short-, medium-, and long-term savings. I call them Kilo, Mega, Giga, and Tera – referring to how much money I plan to keep in them in the long-term, and how often I plan to take money from them. Bear with me here, but I will start with the 4^th one, Tera, and work my way down to the 1^st and smallest one, Kilo.

Writing a Local Geology Chapter

One of my students recently asked me for advice about her local geology chapter. She noted that her classmates had much longer chapters compared to hers. She believed that the others were writing too much, but at the same time recognized that she probably wasn't writing enough. This made me think back to what guidelines I followed during those times when I had to write my reports for field geology classes. These guidelines are listed below.

 

1. Finish your figures first.

Making figures and writing content are two very different tasks. In my experience, my brain just doesn't like it when I try to switch between them multiple times during a single session. It's very tiring to switch gears when you're trying to maintain focus. I suggest you make figures first, because then they are something to you can refer to as you write the text.

 

When making many figures that follow more-or-less the same template, such as the repetitive figures of each formation, I usually allow myself to listen to music with lyrics, or even have a video of my favorite series playing in the background. Doing this makes it a more pleasant task. When I start with the content writing, I switch to listening to instrumental music.

Conquering the Grad-Life Email Hydra

Okay, I kind of repeated the title of last week’s post. That’s because this post is mainly based on a 2017 article by Zach Hanlon, and in that article he compared his old email system to “slaying a hydra.” It’s been a year since I last read his article, so no, I did not get the hydra inspiration of the last post from him. But when I looked it up again for this post and noticed he also used the hydra reference, I decided to continue with it, especially since it’s remarkably accurate.

Anyway, if you want your email to look like this:

...then keep reading.

Conquering the Grad-life Hydra

The Hydra Torch

You just graduated. You feel great. Excited. Powerful. Like Hercules. Then, you set out on a challenge. You unwittingly decide to be a graduate student. Much like how Hercules went on a challenge to slay the Hydra. You swiftly tend to your classes, just as Hercules swiftly cut off the Hydra's head with a stroke of his sword. Unfortunately for Hercules, and for you, the challenge doesn't end there. In place of the severed head grows a multitude of other heads. These come in the form of a new job, your duties as a member of a laboratory group, your research, etc. What you and Hercules need are a new Hydra-fighting-tool-thing. A torch. This represents your brand-new redesigned productivity system, because the old one that you relied on just for school probably isn’t enough anymore. In fact, you probably weren’t thinking about productivity systems, since all you had to do was follow the highly structured education system: listen to your professor, do your homework, (cram) study for your exams.

There are many articles and videos online about different productivity systems, so this post is going to focus on helping you set up the best configuration for your workflow. This way you’ll have a clear image of the big picture while you experiment with different components of your system. Believe me, it’s probably easier this way instead of trying to find a solution when the problem is already threatening a certain aspect of your life. This blog will probably have follow-up posts tackling how you can use individual components at greater depth.

 

What's it for?

Before you start designing your productivity system, you first ought to realize what it's for. It's important to keep in mind what you need your productivity system to do for you while you explore its many different aspects. I think a good way to think about it is as a set of tools, that allow you to emulate the kind of structure to your life that you’re used to. The thing is, no one’s going to tell you what to do anymore. They’re just going to tell you what they want from you by a certain deadline. Your productivity system will help you organize your thoughts such that you can deal with them at the time you allot for them.

What does tableware have to do with geology?

Sometimes during lectures we tend to take a passive mindset. When the professor is speaking, we usually just lay back and listen. Sometimes if we're feeling a bit more attentive we try to do a bit more. Like take down notes, or try to listen as intently as possible to try and absorb as much as we can. Some people actually think that to do this is enough to get the most out of the lecture...but it probably isn't. 

Learning has to be done actively. When the prof. is giving his or her lecture, you need to actively think of what new information you're being provided with AND trying to sort it out in your head to see where it fits best with the knowledge you already have. Imagine having to maintain a filing cabinet with all your ideas. And your prof. is there handing out new documents of ideas every minute or so. It would be convenient (and somewhat passive) to just file everything you learned in that class under the top most drawer and then just pile on more stuff on it during your next class. But, that big pile of unsorted documents gets hard to find later on when you need them, say when you're studying for an exam. It's better to think of connections to previous knowledge that you already have, either filing them together or at least tagging them to be under the same topic. The more connections you make, the easier it will be to find that idea when a question about it pops up during your test. 

And these connections can be made with almost anything, even those that at first don't seem to be related. One good example I could think of is that moment of realization when learning about hardness in your basic geology or mineralogy class, and how it surprisingly relates to the material composition of tableware.

Common tableware. Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels

Is it possible to write a scientific paper manuscript...in a weekend???

Is it? 

Hi! I'm gonna go ahead and say that for us, it probably isn't. Not yet. But I got the idea for this post when I saw a video on YouTube which is literally entitled "How to Write a Paper in a Weekend (By Prof. Pete Carr)". Professor Carr is a relatively old man and I do not doubt for a second that he can write a paper in a weekend (he actually stated that he was involved in writing around 400 papers). So this post is going to be mainly a synthesis of what he said and my own reactions to his advice, based on my own experiences.

First he laid down some preliminary requirements for this type of activity. Of course, you can't actually write a paper from scratch, without anything to build on. However, I still think that even if you are in the early stages of your research project, you can start following his algorithm.

Organizing your digital files as a geoscientist

Hi everyone! If you're stuck in quarantine like we are now in April 2020 because of the COVID19 disease, or for some other reason, now might be the perfect time to re-organize your digital file system. 

About a week after I graduated, I applied for my first job, and about two weeks after that, I reported to work. During that month of inactivity, I didn't switch to a new file system, so throughout my first year of work, I was mostly creating new folders on-the-fly. This, of course, lead to a very messy file system! At some point in the middle of my second year, I just had to do something about it.

This begs the question, "what is a file system for?" Well, in its simplest form, it's to allow you to find something easily. If you have a small number of files, you don't really need one. That's why I survived for a while without one. But, as a working geoscience grad student, you'll know that we eventually end up with a ton of files, involved in many different aspects of our lives.