My wife and I recently completed Dave Ramsey’s personal finance course called Financial Peace University. Overall, I thought it was a great course with a ton of valuable information regarding personal money management, investing and getting out of debt. Throughout the course, I was struck with how similar the ideas of debt management and fitness really are. In both aspects of your life you have to make budgets (money or calories), utilize personal discipline, and have the ability to maintain motivation for an extended period of time.
A particularly unique idea of Ramsey’s was the “debt snowball”. This was his preferred method of digging yourself out of debt by paying down the smallest debts you owed first then rolling the money that you were using to pay that bill into the next smallest debt owed. This way you would systematically eliminate all your outstanding bills one at a time from the smallest to largest.
While this method of debt elimination is fantastic, I think the idea also holds water in other areas of life management as well. Lately, as you can probably tell from the frequency of my latest blog postings, I’m struggling somewhat in my personal time management. I have a full time job, I’m pursuing a Master’s degree, I have a two year old son and a brand new baby girl. So in an attempt to get my growing “to do” list back to a manageable size, I tried Ramsey’s debt snowball method for time management.
1) I listed out everything that I had to do in the next few weeks on a sheet of paper. Some of these things were simple phone calls I needed to make. Others were long time annoyances that have been on my mind for months.
2) Next, I went through and mentally arranged them in order from “simplest to complete” to “most complex”
3) I systematically began making myself complete the simplest tasks first even if they weren’t due for another two weeks. I did this for a few reasons. One, I could now release the brain power that I had been spending on that simple task and roll it into thinking about the other items. Two, I could use the momentum from marking something off my list as extra motivation to get more things done. It’s funny how satisfying crossing off an annoying task can really be.
4) Finally, I continue this process until only the major things are left. The cleared “to do” list builds my confidence to continue accomplishing things. Plus, all the time I would have spent on worrying about the smaller tasks can now be devoted to productive thinking about the big items.
You may think this is a silly yet obviously application of the “debt snowball” but the idea has genuinely proved productive for me the last couple of days. If you are like me and currently find yourself swamped in small “to do” items progress through them systematically from easiest to hardest and let me know how it works for you.
(photo by Ivan Walsh)
