Long time readers of this site know that for many months I’ve been singing the praises of IWantSandy, an online personal information management program that featured an adorable, anthropomorphized character named “Sandy.” Unfortunately, the company behind Sandy, Values of N, is about to shut it doors and Sandy – and the equally popular Stikkit – will be going offline on December 19. This left me with a problem, because I’ve come to rely pretty heavily on Sandy.

You see, Sandy was more than just a calendar, to do list tracker, or contacts list manager (although she did all of these things very well). The genius of Sandy was that you could talk her like a human. Her pretty good natural language recognition meant that you could send her an email with the subject line, “Remind me to buy my mother some flowers in 3 days,” and she would send you an email at 7am on Thursday telling you to buy your mother some flowers. She interfaced very well with Jott, could be contacted by and send text messages, and was even on Twitter. (Angry note: Twitter actually bought Sandy’s code and has decided to shut down the service rather than keep it going. Booo Twitter!!)

After just a few minutes of getting used to her, I found that Sandy just worked in a way that most software can only dream of!

Now all of that is going away, and after a few days of gnashing of my teeth and beating my breast, I realized that it was time for me to move on and make new cyber-relationships.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a true replacement for Sandy – isn’t that the way is always is with a truly great assistant? – but there are tons and tons and tons of alternatives.

But I Don’t Drink Milk

In a quest to find the next Sandy (maybe named Mandy?), I kept finding one service recommended above all others: Remember the Milk. Like Sandy, RTM is a robust PIM that can handle calendars, tasks, contacts and a whole lot more. It’s used extensively by the Getting Things Done crowd and is actually feature-rich enough to be used as a team project management application.

I spent a couple of days trying RTM out, and I have to say that the results left me a bit cold. The website is much more complex than Sandy and offers a lot more functionality than I need – or want to deal with! RTM works with Jott (which I use enough to pay the Premium membership for) so I can call it up and add tasks. However, the voice recognition is different and I’m still learning the syntax to be able to use it properly.

I was just about to give up on RTM when I discovered that it has plug-ins that work with GMail and Google Calendar (GCal). As you can see here:

I have the plugin set up on my Google Calendar and it adds a row of check marks to the display, just above the timeline. From this interface, I can add and manage tasks in RTM without ever having to visit the website! This simplifies the process a ton and makes me much happier!

Two Emails are Worse Than One

After figuring out that I can ask Google Calendar to email a daily schedule to me (yes, I’m a bit slow to catch on), I’ve come up with a two email solution for my day. RTM sends me a list of my daily tasks, which looks a bit like this:

And Google Calendar sends me a daily schedule, which follows this format:

I can ask either service to remind me of an appointment via text message (I do this for haircuts, which I tend to forget a lot!).

The result is that I can keep track of my day about as well as when Sandy and I were working together at our most efficient, but the solutions available seem to lack a bit of soul. Sure, Gcal’s email is efficient and the layout is classic Google, but where is the panache? Yes, Remember the Milk keeps track of my tasks and has a nice notes feature for expanding on each item with helpful information, but where is the chipper greeting every morning?

The Quest Is Just Beginning

Although my current setup seems to be working, I doubt that it’s going to last forever (or even a year). As you’ve probably figured out, I not thrilled with it, even though it is effective. There are so many alternatives in this space, that I’m sure I’ll find a solution that is more intuitive than Remember the Milk. Some possibilities include:

• KeepUp. I’ve started experimenting with this site for scheduling recurring tasks and annual events like holidays and birthdays. Sure, Gcal and RTM both do this, but I like the community aspect of KeepUp, and it can be used with groups. In the end though, I may dump this one.
• PingMe. This looks like a potentially good solution because I relied on Sandy most for future hard-scheduled tasks. In other words, Sandy remembered what I had to do in the future so that I didn’t have to. PingMe seems to do similar things, and they’ve even written a guide for people switching from Sandy.
• Just Gcal. With Jott integration and SMS notification, it’s possible to use Google Calendar for everything I need. I could just add tasks as all day events (If anyone has a more elegant solution for this, PLEASE let me know!). I just find it so… sterile. Sigh.
• Sandy’s Back. A group of disgruntled programmers have gotten together to create an open source replacement for Sandy. As soon as they start soliciting donations, I’m going to send them $20, but it looks like it will be a long time before anything comes of the project.

So, as you can see, I’m still on the rebound from my recent breakup with Sandy. I can keep hoping that she’ll come back to me – I’d even pay to keep her, just as I do with Jott – but I have to face the facts that she may be gone forever.

Have you found better solutions in the quest for the perfect, truly Virtual Assistant? Please help me and other grieving souls recover the loss of a steady companion. Suggest alternative services in the comments section below!

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Well… what can I say… your post has been extremely interesting to me! I have just learned by reading it that I may turn jobless any day!

I have been a Personal Assistant for years and today most of my work is virtual … but there are tons of other things I do that a program can’t do.

I hire personnel, I teach personnel and fire them when necessary, I go shopping, I look for the best possible services: from repairing appliances to doctors or fireworks. I organize parties for 10, 20 or 50 people. I choose and rent houses for the summer and many etceteras.

You can have a program to remind you today is someone’s birthday, but it’s a little bit more difficult to have a program suggesting presents and wrapping them nicely.

I thought Patricia made some excellent points and invited her to write a guest post to explain more about what a “real” VA does and how one can help you grow your business. This is a topic of much talk and probably even more confusion since people like Tim Ferris and AJ Jacobs have published material talking about VAs organizing their dating lives and reading bedtime stories to their children. Like all trends, some people are trying to push it as far as possible. The result is that lots of average Janes and Joes (like me) are unsure about how to create a proper working relationship with a VA. Patricia does a great job in shedding some light on this issue. If you like what she has to say and find yourself in need of the services of a great, experienced VA, you can contact her at much.happiness (at) gmail.com.

There are words or expressions which have a certain and definite content, which meaning is more or less limited and all of us get approximately the same idea when we hear them. One example would be the word “sugar”. Although there are, of course, different types of sugar, and sugar means something different to a person who suffers diabetes than to a person who is healthy and can eat as much sugar as she wants, still there is no much room for misunderstanding when talking about sugar.

The expression “Personal Assistant”, however, gives place to a baffling array of interpretations, depending on the employer. Yet, adds are placed in classified sections and people go to interviews, expecting to get the job.

But what is the job like? What does a Personal Assistant (PA) do? It depends on the person she assists!

• Some employers demand their PAs to answer the phone, bring coffee, type letters & make bank deposits.
• Other employers demand the above plus correcting in 24 hours a report which took 3 months to be written by other people. “Oh yes, time is tight, but you can do it. And please make sure that there are no mistakes present as the report is decisive for the enterprise’s survival next year.”
• Other employers demand the above plus reminding them of their spouse’s birthday or buying Christmas presents for their children and their spouse. No! Not any present. It must be something that shows that he has long thought about them and he knows them well. But, how? Does his PA know his family so well? Of course not, but she’s efficient and these are the perfect opportunities to demonstrate it.
• Other employers demand the above mentioned tasks plus: finding a house to buy in 10 days; finding the perfect employee for that difficult task overnight; delay the departure of a vessel because his merchandise is not there on time; translate the fridge’s manual; heat his lunch; make an appointment with that famous doctor for this afternoon; water the plants; respectfully and politely receive his visitors; organize the office celebration making sure no one at the office realizes about it; buy that exclusive leather bag which can only be found in Paris… but make sure the cost is reasonable and it reaches the destination on time; organize that business trip… making sure that the branch Manager is there that day and that the hotel room is number 241… “Oh! is it already reserved? You’ll find a solution! You are so good.”

All this on the same day and with a smile on your face that shows how much you appreciate and love the job, because attitude is crucial.

The possibilities are infinite, and when that PA believes that he or she has seen it all and there’s no probability to get surprised… then comes the request to get a copy of the yet unpublished Harry Potter last book, to use one example from the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” which illustrates one of the realities a PA can face.

Can your Personal Assistant be replaced by a computer program?

If your answer is yes, then you have full responsibility on your life, you like managing your own stuff, and you enjoy finding your own solutions to your own problems. The only thing you need is some window opening at your screen reminding you there’s something to remember today at this time.

As far as decision-making is concerned, a computer program cannot do that, no matter how politely the reminder “You must have lunch today!” gets to your screen.

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Of course you’ve all heard about the 4-Hour Workweek by now. Tim Ferris’ runaway best seller and internet phenomenon is one of the most talked about books of the last twelve months. My 4 Hour Workweek chronicles my progress in using the ideas in this book to streamline my own life and move closer to my ideal lifestyle.

In Part 1 of this series, I shared how I streamlined tasks in my personal life and automated in several places. In Part 2 I discussed alternatives to hiring a Virtual Assistant. In this installment, I’ll address using the 4-Hour Workweek at home.

One of the overarching purposes of applying the 4-Hour Workweek is to reduce the amount of time you spend on tasks that aren’t important or interesting so that you can focus on activities that enrich your life in some way. This is really important to keep in mind when trying to streamline things at home. As Cindy explained in her awesome guest post, The Business of Family Living, there are definite limits to what most people want to eliminate and automate. For example, I don’t think most of us want to outsource our relationships!

In my quest to apply the 4-Hour Workweek to my personal life, I’ve tried to keep this idea in mind. I don’t want to become super-efficient at the expense of activities I enjoy, but I don’t want to keep doing tasks just because I’ve always done them. I have also been trying the weight costs vs. benefits and not spending more to streamline a task than my (or my SO’s) hourly wage.

Now, in a perfect world, I would just go out and buy myself a robot maid like Rosie from The Jetsons. Then, my laundry would always be done, my kitchen would be clean, and I would have a sandwich waiting for me when I got home from work. Unfortunately, technology has not yet brought us flying cars or the automatic shower conveyor belt (actually, that one didn’t look so fun ), so I’ve had to find other ways to adapt. In a nutshell, I’ve analyzed a lot of tasks and broken them up by:

• What to Batch
• What to Do Immediately, and
• What to Outsource

The main guideline I used to analyze what task goes where is: What will take me the least amount of time, while maintaining my quality of life? So, if it won’t take any more time to leave something for batching and won’t drive me insane (like leaving dirty laundry piled on my floor), I’ll batch it. If delaying will take more time or cost more money in the end, such as ignoring a household repair, I do it immediately. If it takes me too long, I don’t know how to do it, or I can get someone else to do it cheaply, I outsource it. Here’s some more detail on each.

What to Batch

There are a lot of tasks that take a lot less time to do when they are grouped together in batches. Most of these take special equipment, a lot of concentration, or involve the use of machinery that operates more efficiently when full. Some of the tasks that I batch are:

• Bill paying. I have a few bills I can’t pay automatically through my bank account or with my credit card. All of these wait until the last week of the month when I write the few physical checks I use.
• Laundry washing and drying. Pretty much everyone knows that washing full loads of laundry is more efficient than doing partial loads. For me, washing laundry every other weekend works pretty well. If you have kids or a really small wardrobe, you may need to do laundry more frequently, but try to not do so every day or every two days. You can’t “work ahead” in this area!
• Cooking. On Sundays I usually cook lunch for the entire week. One week I may make something in the crock pot, another week I’ll make chili or soup. Also, I eat a lot of rice, so I make enough rice for a week. For most recipes, making a double or triple batch doesn’t take any extra time and it can save 30-60 minutes on another night.
• Shopping. Buying in bulk saves time and often saves money. As much as possible, buy large quantities of non-perishable and frozen groceries as well as other household staples like soap, cleaning supplies, and paper products. If you can catch these items on sale, so much the better, but don’t spend a lot of time bargain shopping. Instead, find a store or two that has competitive prices on lots of items and don’t worry about the $5 you might have saved by visiting three stores over the course of 2 hours. You can also apply this strategy to buying clothes. For example, if you need t-shirts, find some that you like and buy 5. Then you won’t need anymore t-shirts for 6 months or a year. Fewer trips to the store saves time and saves you from impulse shopping.

What to Do Immediately

• Write things down. This may seem a little too GTD for all you hard core 4HWW’s, but writing down lists, ideas and to-dos immediately saves a lot of mental RAM and a lot of stress down the line. Of course, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel, which is why I use templates whenever possible for lists. Here is a free Microsoft Excel template that I customized and use as a grocery list. Click on the picture to download this one and a lot more.

• Laundry sorting. Seriously, don’t leave your laundry lying in a heap on the floor. At the very least get a big hamper to store it in. Even better, get some sorting bins to keep in your closet or wherever you store your clothes. That way you can handle the sorting in one step when you are changing out of dirty clothes. It’s more efficient and makes life a little more pleasant.
• Loading/Unloading the dishwasher. One of the keys to keep dishes from clogging up your kitchen is to put dirty dishes in the dishwasher as soon as you are done using them. When the dishes are clean, put them away as soon as possible after they are dry. This keeps the dishwasher available for storage. One of these days I hope to upgrade to a slick 2-drawer dishwasher system, but for now I’m using what I have efficiently.
• Home repairs. A little leak can turn into a flood. A funny ozone smell can be coming from a bad wire that is about to spark. Unless you know what you’re doing, I highly recommend you outsource this (see below), but do it quickly. This is one area a VA can help out tremendously.
• Wiping up spills and small messes. I do have a house cleaner, but I don’t just let goo pile up during the two weeks between her visits. I’ve found that it’s easiest to clean up spilled ingredients, potted plant dirt, and toothpaste if you get it quickly. Having a sponge or some cleaning wipes handy helps a ton to keep this a quick job. I also own a rechargeable vacuum sweeper that is a lot quicker to use than the big vacuum cleaner.

What to Outsource

• Anything that can FLOOD or BURN DOWN your house. If you are a plumber or electrician, you can ignore this. Most of us are not, and we shouldn’t even try to fix the major systems in our houses without adult supervision. In addition to pipes and wires, this applies to things like appliances, lawnmowers, telephone lines, and HVAC systems. Use your best judgement, but an ill informed DIY project can get really expensive, really fast. My approach is to befriend qualified people who do some work on the side. This saves money over hiring a company and over me fouling things up!
• Grocery shopping. Okay, I don’t do this one (yet). However, if you live in an area that has Peapod or a similar service, you might consider it for your weekly produce purchases and other things that can’t be bought in bulk. You could also try an online service like Amazon Grocery for some staples. If these fail, the best solution is probably to find a student or other low-cost worker who can run your errands for you. I’m not at that point, but plan to be soon.
• Time consuming, boring things. A couple of years ago SO and I had to pressure wash and reseal our deck. This isn’t hard, but damn is it boring! There are lots of fun tasks like this that come with owning a home: cleaning gutters, washing exterior windows, mulching, lawn winterizing – the list is endless. Either move to an apartment where you don’t have to worry about stuff like that, or find someone who can do this for you. It will save you hours of time and probably a sore back – and maybe your relationship
• Cleaning. I already do this one. If the idea of having someone else clean your toilets just grosses you out, try it just once. It may change your life!

What to NOT Streamline

• Anything you TRULY ENJOY or get VALUE from. The whole point of applying the 4HWW methodology is to free up your time to focus on what you LIKE to do and what you GROW from doing. If you really like playing video games – go for it. If you ENJOY cooking huge, elaborate meals, do it. Anything I’ve listed above can be a hobby as well as a chore.
• Time with your friends and family. We can joke about outsourcing our lives, but I personally don’t have any desire to make my interactions with my friends and family “more efficient.” As much as possible I try to stay away from group emails, or voicemail messages if my goal is to connect and not just exchange data.

Everyone’s home situation is different and it’s impossible to recommend universal solutions to create more efficiency at home. If you’ve found other solutions that work for you, please share them with us in the comments.

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In Part 1 of this series, I shared how I streamlined tasks in my personal life and automated in several places. In this installment, I’ll share how I have found alternatives to hiring a Virtual Assistant.

One of the Holy Grails of the 4-Hour Workweek community is having your own Virtual Assistant, or VA. Thanks in part to the book’s popularity, there are hundreds of firms in India, the Philippines, China and Eastern Europe offering to screen your email, do your Internet research, and wait on hold on the phone for you. Sites like Elance, Guru.com and Odesk are swimming with individuals providing business and personal assistance. Frankly, it’s very overwhelming and there are a lot of stories on the 4-Hour Workweek forum about the struggles of finding a decent VA.

Based on my own previous experience, I decided that there had to be other alternatives.

Get Sandy
Meet my new personal assistant. She’s prompt, reliable, never gets sick, and has a great sense of humor. I don’t pay her a dime, but she shows up at 7:00am every morning, ready and willing to help. Her name is Sandy. Isn’t she cute?

Did I mention that she’s a web application?

Sandy is a member of a growing genre of web apps that is designed to keep your appointments, to-do lists and contacts organized in a way that is a lot more intuitive and user friendly than a standard calendaring app. Remember the Milk is another popular site in this genre, but I prefer Sandy because “she” has, well, personality.

When I thought about what I’d like a personal assistant to do – virtual or otherwise – I realized that most of what I want can be automated as I shared in Part 1 of this series. The rest included things like helping me keep track of birthdays, random tasks, contact information, and the other little bits of info that tend to get lost in the shuffle in my life. Sandy can do all of that and more, and with style.

I can send messages to Sandy through email, SMS, her own website, and – with integration through Jott – by voice. If I tell Sandy “remind me to complete my expense report next Wednesday @work” she’ll know to tag my task as work, and will send me an email reminder to complete my task on next Wednesday morning. I don’t even have to tell her the date.

Sandy can send a text message reminder for whichever tasks I choose. I have this bad habit of forgetting to show up for my haircut appointments. To prevent this, I can ask Sandy to send me a reminder text message 30 minutes (or at whatever time I’d like) before my appointment. Do you forget to pack your lunch in the morning? Take your medication at the proper time? Shave? Sandy can help you out with that, too.

Sandy can share information with your contacts and integrates with Google Calendar. It’s such a full-featured service, that I’ll just let Sandy tell you all about her other fine attributes here.

For me, the best feature of Sandy is the daily digest that she sends. I find it useful, informative and pithy. Here is a slightly edited version of a recent daily digest I received:

Hello, Maria!
Here’s what’s going on today.
Friday, 2/29/2008
————————————————–
#1 Fri, 2/29 Backup blog
- Email reminder at 7:00am
- tagged with @weekly
#2 1:00pm Clean your desk
- Email reminder at 12:30pm
- tagged with @weekly
#3 5:00pm Party like a rockstar

- Email reminder at 4:45pm
- tagged with @weekly

To-dos
————————————————–
#4 Mon, 3/3 Pay Your Dealer
- Email reminder at 8:00am
- tagged with @monthly and @todo

————————————————–
Make today your own!
Sandy

Try to find a Virtual Assistant with that much wit and flair!

Call Your Personal Concierge
As much as I love Sandy, let’s face it. There are some tasks only a human can do. Some of these tasks are potentially time-consuming and the outcome isn’t all that important, in the grand scheme of things. This is the perfect type of task to outsource.

When I did a little analysis on the type of tasks that I have in my personal life that fit into this category, I realized that most of them revolve around going somewhere, buying something, or eating something. In other words, they’re usually related to recreation and travel. When I browsed through the archives of Tim Ferris’ blog, I was really intrigued by this post extolling the virtues of the American Express Platinum Card. The card comes with an impressive array of services including 24/7 concierge service. Unfortunately, it also comes with a hefty annual fee ($450 at the time of this writing). Even with the other perks, I just can’t justify getting this card at this time.

I am already a Visa card holder, so I decided to see if Visa offers a similar type of program. After a little digging, I found the Visa Signature card, which includes unlimited access to the Visa Signature Concierge service. The array of services they offer includes all of the usual things like making restaurant reservation, booking flights, finding tickets to sold out events (for a price, of course) and sending the occasional invitation to member events. After checking with my bank, I discovered that I could upgrade my regular old Visa Platinum card to a Visa Signature card for no fee.

That means that I now have unlimited access to all of the concierge services for free. I love free

In the month that I’ve had the card, I’ve only had a couple of occasions to use the services, but I’ve been very pleased with the results so far. Here is an excerpt from an email I received from the service after I requested a listing of vegetarian restaurants in Sedona, Arizona.

Dear Maria,

Thank you for requesting dining recommendations from Visa Signature® Concierge. Based on your request, we’ve provided several options below.

If you would like to make a reservation, or have any questions, please call Visa Signature Concierge toll-free – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – at 800-953-7392.

Option 1
Restaurant: The Heartline Cafe
Location: 1610 West Highway 89A; Sedona, AZ 86336 USA
Phone number: 928-282-785
Website: http://www.heartlinecafe.com/

Type of Cuisine: Continental
Dining Style: Casual Elegant
Dress Code: Casual Elegant
Average Cost: $21.00 to $50.00 per plate
Description: Offering innovative presentations of pasta, fish, chicken, and a variety of meats, grilled or roasted. Many vegetarian dishes are offered, some of them are green-only dishes. The pleasures of the meal are all represented, from appetizers to dazzling desserts, with soup, salad, sandwiches, and great entrees in between.

The complete message listed a few more options as well as a repeat of the offer to book reservations. I estimate that it would have taken me at least 20-30 minutes of web browsing to select a few decent sounding restaurants. Instead, all I had to do was send a 2 minute email and choose from the list. By the way, I ended up going to a raw vegan restaurant that made the list and it was great.

These services are more limited than a firm like AskSunday offers. As far as I know, Visa concierges won’t read your child a bedtime story, find people to break in your new jeans, or send sarcastic emails to your friends (you’ve got to read the book to understand!). However, I haven’t tried to push the boundaries yet. If anyone has found unconventional uses for services like these, I would love to hear your stories, in the comments or privately.

Solutions That Fit the Problems
I’ve shared all of this to show that outsourcing your life doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. At this time, I don’t need an army of VAs running my entire life for me. I’m not even sure I ever want that. For the present moment, I have defined my needs (the crucial first step in the book) to include streamlining as much of my life as possible at the lowest possible cost. This is a means to the end of freeing up more of my time to pursue activities that I find more interesting, rewarding, and fulfilling.

If you have stories of outsourcing, or resources to share, please let us know about them in the comments.

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The 4-Hour Workweek contains lots of intriguing ideas, but the one that’s gained the most traction in the blogosphere is the concept of outsourcing your life. The basic idea behind personal outsourcing is that you hire a person or firm in a lower wage country like India or the Philippines to become your Virtual Assistant or VA. In the book, author AJ Jacobs describes how his Indian VA helped with internet research, kept track of his schedule and even apologized to his wife for him and read his child a bedtime story.

Unfortunately, as I found it’s not as easy as it sounds to find a decent firm or individual VA. My own attempt – which involved hiring an Indian firm to research social activities for me – ended in a mishmash of unclear goals (my fault) and poor English skills. I’ve stopped by the 4 Hour Workweek forums occasionally, and lots of people seem to be having similar problems. Clearly, there is a better way to offload some of the tasks we all have to do but just don’t have time for.

Eliminate the Fluff
When I analyzed my experience of trying to outsource my social planning, I realized that I wasn’t all that interested in getting the task completed successfully. It was really just an addition to the things I already have to deal with. That is a big error according to the 4HWW methodology, which urges the reader to eliminate everything that isn’t necessary before trying to automate or outsource anything. As Ferris writes, “Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamline.” My problem was that I was trying to delegate a pointless task. Over the next couple of months I looked at my daily life and identified everything I could eliminate or streamline in some way.

Automate Every Possible Task
By keeping some casual time logs over the course of two weeks, I was able to do some 80/20 analysis and figure out where I was spending my personal time and compare that to what I enjoy doing. What I found is that I was spending too much time on household chores, money management, and routine information gathering. None of these things are my idea of fun, so I wanted to find ways to free up my time from these tasks in ways that are easy to maintain and affordable. Of course the first place I turned was the holder of all things good and true in the universe – Google! If anything could help me automate my information gathering, surely I would find it there.

Google to the Rescue
As a technologically savvy, Web 2.0 kind of girl I’ve had a Gmail account for a couple of years, but I hadn’t taken the time to learn about all of its capabilities. After a little hunting around, I found out about Google Alerts – a service that monitors the news and sends customized emails with links to new pages that contain the keywords you specify. I immediately set up a few alerts to keep me informed of news in my professional field, personal change and change management updates for this blog, and a couple of personal areas of interest.

I also learned more about setting up email filters and created a “Social Life” label. I signed up for email newsletters for my local music, art and cultural venues and have them all labeled and archived when they arrive. When I have a free weekend coming up (not very often!), I read the most recent and forward ideas to my friends and family members. It takes me 20 minutes at the most every other week to do what I was willing to pay a VA about $50 a month for.

Yeah For Online Banking
I’m pretty loyal to my local credit union. The fees are almost nonexistent, the service is great and the ATM network is ubiquitous. The one drawback had been the limited functionality of the online banking system. However, just as I was in the process of streamlining my personal finances, my credit union merged with another local credit union and upgraded all their systems. In the short term this was a big PITA, but now I have the ability to get my statements online, pay lots of bills automatically and a few more manually once per month, and transfer money between my local account an my online accounts. That simple change along eliminates about two hours per month from my personal finance management time.

Xpenser For My Type A Side
I have a confession to make. Since I read Your Money or Your Life about two years ago I’ve tracked every dollar that I spend every day of my life. I’m sure Tim Ferris would not approve, but I find it helpful and I’m not willing to let it go (yet). However, after I realized that it was taking me up to 20 minutes a day, plus another hour or two per month to manage this task, I decided that I had to streamline my system a bit. This time Google didn’t have an answer for me, but I was lucky enough to stumble across Xpenser. This web application is designed for keeping track of business related expenses for tax and reimbursement purposes. However, I find that it works just as well for personal expenses. Now I’ve streamlined my expense tracking to three steps:

1. Keep receipts for anything purchased with a credit or debit card
2. Email Xpenser or leave a Jott (more on this service later) to my account for cash purchases
3. Tally everything up at the end of the month

It’s still too anal, but it’s getting better

I hope this series is helpful to people interested in streamlining their own lives. If you have had any successes or found tools or applications you want to share, please tell us about it in the comments.

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