Extravagance

[tinyjo]

I suddenly seem to have gone from spending almost nothing to an enormous spree! I have finally taken the plunge and gone for ADSL, so as well as a one off setup fee I have bought a wireless ADSL router. Of course, this means that I also need to get a wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop, which I'll probably do while shopping over the weekend. And then there's the weekend. I'm hiring a car to travel down to my parents, not cheap but when apportioned between the 2 of us, not much more than the public transport route really. While there we plan on an enourmous Christmas shopping spree followed by me treating my family to dinner at a really nice resturant (the Lavender House in Brundall).

And now I find myself actually considering spending £50 on a piece of software! I have never spent that much on software in my life. But it is really good software. Specificially, it's Life Balance. I've described this to a few people who have either been fascinated or bemused in general, but I'm finding it really useful. The idea is that you enter tasks not only related to work, etc but related to anything. And you enter things which you wouldn't even think of as tasks like "Go to CBS" (which is under my "Socialize" goal). You have a few top level goals to group these tasks under, and you set how important each task is to it's parent. Then you turn to the pie chart and set how much of your time you want to spend pursuing each goal. The software then shuffles your task list to help you achieve the balance you've requested. You can fine tune it to a huge extent by varying the effort level a task, the importance of it to it's parent (you can infinitely nest, as far as I can tell), and setting the place it can be done in. I'm getting better and better at using it all the time and now my 30 day trial is about to run out. I think that I will end up coughing up because I really don't want to part with it, and I suppose the 50 quid is covering the desktop and Palm versions, but still. When am I going to manage to start a savings account, eh?

Comments

[jinty]

Had a look at that Life Balance thingy. Sounds scarily all-inclusive / really useful. May well give it a try myself. The problem I'm having at the moment is that my Palm still doesn't want to sync with my Mac, so I suppose maybe I should reinstall stuff and try again, because this sounds like something where you'd probably want to keep things sync'd regularly for reasons of backing it up if nothing else.

[entirelysonja.livejournal.com]

I tried Life Balance a few years ago -- I found it interesting, but in the long term didn't find that it worked out for me. Mostly, I seem to recall it was because of the amount of record-keeping required.

Anyway, I'm glad you're finding it useful!

So you unfroze it?

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

How big was the bowl your froze your credit card in? :-)

Sounds like a Good Plan, actually, and New Year is the traditional time for Planning the Savings Account. There are probably some tax advantages to starting a cash mini-ISA or a tracker ISA, as far up to the limit as you can possibly go a few days before the end of this tax year and then starting a *new* one immediately after the beginning of the next tax year. Nationwide and Northern Rock both do some pretty good SA deals too if you don't want to go the ISA route...

btw, may I list you as a Friend?

Re: So you unfroze it?

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had to get it out anyway to do the car hire :)

Thanks for the savings advice (ISA sounds good to me) and of course you are welcome to list me as a friend :)

ADSL

[pne.livejournal.com]

Yay for ADSL :)

I'm very happy I got it, despite the high-ish setup costs.