I stare at it and am so totally immobilized, because at that point, it's hard to even see the individual tasks. It's just this amorphous blob of "stuff to do".
I can't be the only person who does this. And it annoys the heck out of me.
Case in point... I keep our joint finances updated once a week using GnuCash, an Open Source accounting program. It works beautifully.
It takes about 15 minutes a week (give or take) and then a longer spell at the end of the month when I transfer totals into a spreadsheet and produce our monthly financial report.
I know that if I don't do the weekly updates... and push them too far into the future... it's going to get messy, very fast. If I'm trying to catch up on 4 weeks of finances... ugh... it's a massive snow blob! And it takes me hours as I stare at receipts trying to figure out what those cryptic product descriptions are. "What the heck did I buy at Home Depot that day?" In a normal household, this wouldn't be a big deal but since we run a business... I need to know what I bought to see if it's a business expense!
And then there are my personal finances. I might enter my credit card purchases and keep the bank account info up to date every couple of weeks... but... I don't transfer all of that info into my personal financial spreadsheet. Ugh. It's probably all of 2022 that needs to be processed. It's tedious. It's a huge pile of snow-ploughed small tasks. And... I just keep turning away from it... until it's March and tax time is looming.
The thing is... it's easy to hop over the little tasks in life... all of those individual tasks are so small that I can say... "I'll do that later... next week, next month". But I never do. And then I'm facing tax time and... I need to know what I spent last year on various things like website hosting, book purchases, research costs, etc... all of which are tax deductions. Sooo... this is where the pedal hits the metal. I knew this time was coming and I pushed all of those tasks off... and now they have come home to roost.
Our joint finances are usually in great shape for pulling out info for our tax accountant. Yay me!
Personal finances... not such great shape. I've done this repeatedly. Every time, I get annoyed with "Past Me" who didn't do the small steps that would make "Future Me" happy. Nope. And it seems like I forget this lesson. Once tax time is done... I slack off again. It's November and... guess what... my personal finances haven't been updated since... March...
So here's my thought... when I do those monthly financial reports for our joint accounts... I will take 30 min and do my personal financial report as well - transfer all of that monthly info into my spreadsheet. I'm already on a roll from the joint report... so it won't take as much effort... will it?
It's true that regular maintenance takes less time than trying to catch upon several weeks worth of stuff. It takes less work to clean the stove after every meal than to let stuff accumulate there and then you're scrubbing and grumbling and... you get the picture. Same with shoveling the driveway - it takes way less effort to shovel a few inches of snow every couple of hours than to wait until there's a foot of snow on the driveway. Ugh.
Regular maintenance does take some commitment. I'm not sure why this particular task of personal finances is so hard for me. Perhaps it seems less important than the joint finances? Perhaps I don't want to know how much I've spent at Starbucks every month? I'm a little gloomy that it's November and nothing has changed. Although... if I caught up now, that would be better than trying to catch up in March! Right? Right!
Small regular steps... that's the key... you'd think I would have learned and absorbed this by now!
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