Thing #16: Getting Organized

During college, I used mint.com to help keep track of my finances, which at the time only consisted of my college loans, checking, and savings account.  But, working at an ice cream shop I had limited dollars coming in so I needed a way to keep track of how I was spending my money and a tight budget.  For instance, if I had allotted $30 for eating out for the month, and $100 on groceries, then I needed a way to keep track of remembering how much I was spending.  Mint provided graphs showing how much I had spent during a given period for a given budget, and pie charts showing the percentage I was spending in each category out of total dollars spent.  Mint helped me tremendously during college: I always had food in the refrigerator and a little cash left over for Christmas gifts at the end of the semester.

Lifehacker I found to be quite the opposite: a productivity killer.  Simply because whenever I go there to find some efficient way of doing something, I always end up spending more time just browsing the various articles.  For example: I first started working on this Thing #16 two weeks ago, but am just now circling back around to it because when I saw the link to Lifehacker and visited the site I was sucked into an article titled "How I Pulled Off a 10-Day London Vacation for $700".  Needless to say, investigating this feat was the rest of my evening.

Google calendars - I use them every day and they're wonderful because it helps keep my husband and I in the same loop as to our schedules and family and friend's birthdays.  The calendars even sync to our phones.  Doesn't get any better than that.  As far as start pages, I use the Window's 8 start page that includes weather, gmail, sports, stocks, and photos to name a few.