Posts filed under 'MiLO'
Following up on my Micro Life Organizer (MiLO), I am pleased to announce my Financial Life Organizer (FiLO) for your consideration.
Over the last few months I’ve been reading numerous books on building wealth, and one of the core themes running throughout all of these books has been; if you don’t track your spending, you’ll spend to much. If you spend to much, and have a “high consumption” lifestyle, you’ll never be wealthy.
Since I’m not counting on winning the PowerBall lottery anytime soon, and no one in my family will be leaving anything behind when they shuffle off their mortal coil, I decided I needed a better way to track my spending.
Keeping track of checks and credit card expenses isn’t completely difficult in this day of on-line banking and instant account checking. But I find that I don’t check these tools on a daily basis. At best I check them weekly, and I can spend a surprisingly large amount of money in a week if I’m not careful! And forget about tracking cash - if I have $20 in my pocket there is no way on God’s green Earth that I’ll remember what the heck I spend it on 24 hours after it’s gone.
Given my lack of a fortune coming at the hands of the lottery or a distance, but insanely rich great-great-aunt, and my lack of discipline to capture my monetary transactions in all their various places on a daily basis; I knew I needed a better solution. So I sat down and created FiLO.
The essence of a FiLO is a cash, check and credit card register that folds neatly into a 2.75″ x 4.25″ booklet that you can stick in your pocket or carry in your wallet. The goal is to make sure I never have an excuse to not record a financial transaction.
And I figured if I find FiLO useful, other people might too…people like you!
Of course, you want to see what FiLO looks like; in terms of form if looks exactly like MiLO.
When FiLO is folded, it’s only a bit bigger than a credit card and gives you seven pages to track your financial transactions. The back page is a “Get Excited & Motivated” page and shows you how even saving a tiny bit of money, but doing it on a regular basis, can make you wealthy in your lifetime!
FiLO is free for you to use and pass around to anyone you think would get benefit from it. Here’s where to download it:
PLEASE NOTE: If you’re printing this PDF with Windows, make sure to select “Page Scaling = None” on the print options when you print out a FiLO or Acrobat Reader will shrink the FiLO down by a few percent and it will not fold properly. This is one of the biggest frustrations people using Windows will have printing out a FiLO for themselves.
I hope you enjoy using your FiLO, and I hope it can help you keep closer tabs on your spending. Good luck and good wealth!
February 14th, 2006
After posting the article titled, “The weight of an idea.” I had several people inquire about the index cards I print out for myself.
I used Adobe Pagemaker to lay the card out and I keep a stack of them near me pretty much everywhere I go. A pack of 100 index cards costs about $0.99 and I figure my printer (an HP LaserJet 1000) costs me about $0.02 per card to print. So my total cost to print my own cards is around $0.03 each, or $3.00 per hundred - cheap!
I’ve tried printing these cards with an ink jet printer, but I found that the ink is sucked into the card stock and ends up looking blurry and a bit gray for my tastes. The laser printer gives very crisp lines and text and is dead-on black. It looks very professional when you jot a note on one and hand it to a colleague - they’ll think you had cards custom printed - snazzy!
I’ve created two PDFs of this card if you want to print them at home for your own use.
My printer will feed a 3×5 index card (many printers will), but only in the dead center of the paper tray. The guides close down equally from each side.
If your printer is like this, then you want to download the 3×5 Index Card for a full size page. (
) It’s centered on a 8.5″ x 11″ sheet and will print right onto a 3×5 card fed down the center of a paper tray.
If your printer adjusts to feed index cards down one edge, then you will probably want to download the 3×5 Index Card sized for a 3″ x 5″ page ().
Here’s is what the card looks like (click the image to enlarge).
It has the text “Next Action / ‘To Do’” at the top with room for a date or other small note at the top (maybe an @Context for you GTD fans?).
Below that are three category check-boxes (A, B, & C) and five priority check-boxes (1, 2, 3, 4, & 5). This allows you to classify a task or action with up to 15 different priority codes.
Plenty of blank space follows next, here’s where you’re genius comes in.
At the bottom is a place to note the current date, a due date if follow up is needed and if you’re delegating the task to someone else, you can write their name here.
Put a check in the little check-box with the arrow to indicate more is continued on the back of the card.
I carry a fresh load of these cards in a leather index card case from Gifts For Professionals. It’s cheap ($15.95) and is barely noticeable tucked away in a back pocket. It holds about 8 fresh cards and 4 “noted” cards. You could probably jam more cards in, but I’ve never run out with 8 cards on me. I refill it at night as needed.
Levenger also makes a pocket briefcase to hold index cards; it’s $38.00 but looks like it might be a little more sturdy that the case I bought.
I hope you find this card useful. If you keep it on you all the time - you’ll never let your next million dollar idea slip away.
February 12th, 2006
I’ve been intrigued by Merlin Mann’s Hipster PDA for some time. I tried building and carrying one myself, but I found I wasn’t really using it in a way that suited my own note taking and “next action” capturing style.
I don’t work well with discreet items all on their own note card and when I tried to capture more than one “action” per note card I found that didn’t work well for me either! I liked the idea of a low-tech solution to capturing my random thoughts and urgent action items, but the HPDA didn’t seem to be the best fit for me.
So I started thinking about what was a good fit, and I realized that keeping a list on paper was how I worked best, and making something that was easily carried was most important to me. Around the time I formalized my wants, I happened across a web site for the “Cheapster PDA” - a single 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper folded into a little booklet. I immediately whipped out a sheet of paper, folded it up and thought, “The form is good, but how can I improve on this?”
I decided that I wanted some structure to my booklet. A place to keep my list of actions, a place for free-form notes and maybe even a place for a schedule would be all items I would want to incorporate. After some tinkering around with page layout software I came up with a design that suited my desires and put it to the test. It was a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper run through my laser printer and then folded up. It worked great.
I dubbed it the micro life organizer; “MiLO” for short. I printed a handful out and gave them to my wife and some select friends for testing. The feedback was positive, they all liked the form and the usefulness of the MiLO! After some feedback, and tweaking to suit my own needs, I decided to roll out the MiLO to the Internet for all to use.
When the MiLO is all folded up it’s 2.75″ wide and 4.25″ tall, only a little bigger than a credit card. It takes about 40 seconds to fold the MiLO into booklet form and all you need to make one is a laser or ink-jet printer that can print to within a quarter inch of the edge of the page.
There are five lined pages, complete with check boxes, two pages are blank for free-form notes and the back page is a week-in-a-view calendar (Sunday - Saturday).
I find that I can easily get a normal week’s usage out of one MiLO, and during really busy weeks I might need a second MiLO by the middle of the week. It’s also setup so if you’re a devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system you can assign a context at the top of each “action” page (for example; @work, @calls, @home, @internet, @someday).
I’m hoping that other people will find the MiLO useful too which is why I’m posting it here. You can download a PDF that you can print out for yourself: Download MiLO2.0.pdf (version 2.0) here.
PLEASE NOTE: If you’re printing this PDF with Windows, make sure to select “Page Scaling = None” on the print options when you print out a MiLO or Acrobat Reader will shrink the MiLO down by a few percent and it will not fold properly. This is one of the biggest frustrations people using Windows will have printing out a MiLO for themselves.
The MiLO is available free of charge for anyone to use. I hope you find it as useful as I do, it’s an easy way to keep a lot of items handy without needing a lot of space to do it. If you find it useful, please leave a comment and let me know!
December 3rd, 2005
