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.

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.

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.