purpose of this goalstream:
to understand & simplify my personal finances while extracting a goalstreaming case study.
I have changed my Posterous account for my finance stream so that all of my posterous' are owned by one email address. You can find the new posterous here: http://jessicamullenfinance.posterous.com/
made a citi payment. in addition to autopay. new goal: pay off card.
Well I did take one week off of my financial hygiene routine. I accomplished the goal I set out to achieve with this blog/goalstream: “to understand & simplify my personal finances while extracting a goalstreaming case study.” I am working on coming up with a new goal for this stream, which will likely involve more work with budgeting.
- Set a timer. let’s try 19 minutes. 3:41pm.
- Check paperwork. Bills? Notices? Unopened mail? Sort, pay, and share. Ugh still need to cancel my GEICO insurance. They won’t let me do it on the website of course. I have to call this number: 866-915-1172. Next: pay my electric bill. $124.62 this month. $20.59 less than last month.
- Check email inbox for ’starred’ emails of due bills. Pay and un’star’. Document. iPhone still set to autopay:
- Go through receipts. Email photos of receipts with dollar amounts in heading. Add shared expenses to daytum account. Added the electric bill:
- Check balances at Chase twice, Citi, Discover, student loans. Make appropriate payments, screen shot often.
Paid business credit card & loan:
- Check calendar for upcoming due dates or milestones.
- need to cancel GEICO by dec 21
- registration + tuition
- xmas gifts
- travel funding
- powerbook logic board
- dentist appt
- order stamps
- With any remaining time, log into Wesabe and/or Mint and tag expenses, work on specific projects, etc. Logged into Wesabe. Nothing new to report. Until Kel & I are totally square, I won’t have many expenses to tag/budget.
Actual time to write this post: 37 minutes.
Mood: relief. The system I have set up is actually quite effective. I feel like I don’t have to worry about money for at least another week. Will work on budgeting in a group brainstorm with Kel.
Lifestreaming is sharing your experiences and activities online. It is a reverse-chronological flow of information that reveals patterns, provides opportunities for real-time interaction with others, and builds your reputation. Your lifestream is an archive of interactions between digital and flesh.
We document experiences, store them online, and share them, leading to new experiences to document. Like the Ouroboros, a lifestream is a cyclical, self-reflexive, constant re-creation of the self.
As lifestreaming becomes more accessible and we are able to extract more and more data from our lives, meaningful parsing of the information becomes more difficult. Lifestreaming can generate a lot of “noise”–a sea of information that is hard to use. Approaching a lifestream with a specific purpose or goal (“goalstreaming”) can help categorize and focus updates.
Can one use a lifestream to make measurable progress towards a goal? The Financial Goalstream case study report details my recent goalstream experiment. The goal I chose was “to understand and simplify my personal finances.” I fed everything finance-related in my life into one site, so that I could first visualize my financial situation, then measure it, and then begin to consciously manage it.
Although there are privacy concerns that arise when putting any information online, the primary value of goalstreaming is that it is public. We share our experiences for motivation, accountability, feedback, and to build reputation.