We all know that Google Plus is not taking off the way Google anticipates. Fact is most people is already on facebook so why would your friends want to migrate over to another social platform.

The Gurus sold to us that Google’s social power is different because we are using their Gmail,Calendar and Search all the time.

But up till now, we are not seeing that element in all our web applications. We still see it as a chore to need to go over to Plus to view most of the stuff.

Until now.

Notice This new roll out and you can actually post your feelings, views and updates wherever you are in a Google application, be it search, calendar or email. This will greatly enhance people easily socializing.

We hope Google goes one step further, which is to do what Facebook does in their update bar where you can actually view the friend’s update in full and reply to the comments.

There are some important lessons not taught in school but are necessary in life. One of them is to manage your cash and money well.

One of the greatest problem faced in the twenty first century have been how debts have taken such a great hold of people’s lives. People start asking the questions how do they get themselves out of so much debts.

The answers presented in many personal finance sites are largely the same.

You take responsibility in how you use and manage your money

1. Do not carry debt. Except perhaps mortgage. We should avoid credit card,car loans and home renovation loans as possible
2. Have adequate emergency cash. You want to build a large buffer cash slowly so that in the event of a situation you have something to fall back on
3. Start your investment warchest. I always said create a nest egg early. Pay yourself first and learn to invest and put your money to grow
4. Be insured. You do not know when illness and tragedy will strike and when they do you will need a sum of money that you will have difficulty to come up with. Hedge that risk by buying cheap low cost insurance
5. Develop a budget. Manage your money in a systematic way. Give each dollar a job
6. Boost your income. There is no point just saving and scrimping. It will be massively easier to upgrade  yourself, focus on how to carve a great career and earn a better income

You need a budget as your personal finance manager

One software that understands how to help you make sense of your finances have been You need a budget (YNAB). It is a personal finance software that focus heavily on budgeting and help you get out of debt.

It is highly flexible to accommodate to your budgeting methodology. For myself I tried many methods of saving money and I find that by following envelope budgeting, I can allocate my paycheck to virtual envelopes and prevent me from spending over the limit.

1. Find out your spending pattern

The first step is to identify how you currently spend your money. Collect all the receipts from recent purchases for 1-2 months. This will let you know what you spend on typically.

With that you can generalize them into spending categories

2. Give each dollar a job

The next step is to break your monthly income from your salary, passive income, dividend income into virtual envelopes or YNAB categories

YNAB provides a default set of spending categories that you an extend to two levels. You can also specify your own

Basically, each of your transactions will be tag to a category and you can monitor at the budget screen whether you are overspending it.

What if you do not spend enough? The amount will be brought over to next month. In this way if you overspend you will face with a deficit and if you underspend you will face with a surplus.

That means next time you need to spend less if the amount gets negative.

If you get a lot of surplus, it means u can indulge and spend on big ticket items.

3. Enter daily spending in transactions

Every time you spend money, take note of what you spend on. At the end of the day come back home, fire up the PC,  fire up YNAB and record your transactions.

Some people find it difficult to do that but, with smartphones nowadays you can enter your transactions into an iPhone or Android YNAB app or record down in a notepad and enter them at the end of the day.

It is a good habit to record these transactions and I don’t think you need to spend a lot of time.

4. Review your spending pattern

On a quarterly basis, review whether you are meeting your goals.

1. Your emergency cash category should be rising
2. You should be paying yourself first and building up a nest egg
3. You should be paying down your debts through the debt accounts
4. Your hobbies account should not be exceeded

These are some review items to evaluate. You should also evaluate whether some accounts warrant an increase or decrease in amount.

Conclusion

Saving money and clearing debt need not be filled with anxiety and despair. The first step is the most important. Follow the 4 step process to kick start a sensible money management plan.

YNAB can be a great companion software because it is ubiquitous. It is available on the Windows and Mac which means you are not tied into one platform.

YNAB also have Android and iPhone apps that allows you to record, review and sync transactions to the desktop.

I chanced upon this Stock Portfolio Manager project from a site that focus on DRIP investing.

I was pretty impress by it but found that it is not as suitable as my Free Stock Portfolio Tracking Google Spreadsheet. But nevertheless I thought that perhaps some folks would appreciate it.

Why need a tool like this

We talk about the importance of planning financially at different stage of your life so that you do not get to a state where you lose financial control (see Frugal Living)

One portion of the plan is to plan for your nested egg or having adequate money for retirement. Investing in stocks is one of the solutions.

There are many tools or websites that does this but not many focus on enabling you to key in transactions and different currencies.

The Use Case for Stock Portfolio Manager

1. A portfolio manager that works on different platforms
2. Able to let the user fill in his own stocks whether US or international based
3. Able to let the user update based on transactions (buy, sell or dvidends)
4. Able to provide graphing to let the users do a portfolio review

I thought this tool does a pretty competent job. What stopped me from exploring further is that there Is limited currency selection and that for transactions I believe there are more frequently encountered transactions other than buy,sell and dividends.

This application is free and if you are interested to try and see if it works for you, you can download it from here.

Use Case: Some portrait photos look great just like it is being drawn in pencil. How do you do that?

Here is a web application that enable you to put pencil filters and adjust the settings to create a great photo as if you have drawn it

[Go to use Picfull >>]

I never knew why would people want to turn off WIFI background scanning. To me it used to be that you can discover better WIIF connection and you never know when you will go into a local shopping mall and have to discover WIFI connection on the go.

The Benefits

so it turns out I discovered over from NirmalTV.com that there are benefits to optimizing your WIIF connection.

1. It improves latency time of wireless connections.
2. This reduces connection spikes

WLAN Optimizer Software

Here is an app for Windows PC call WLAN Optimizer that starts up everytime you starts in Windows and enable you to Disable background scan.

[Download WLAN Optimizer>>]

I can think of so many instances where I will need something like this. When was the last time you attempt to run an application that is tied to your MAC address?

For those who do not know what is a MAC address, it is an Id that identifies your network devices. It usually comes hard wired during manufacturing so there is no way for you to change it.

However, we discovered this application called Win7 MAC Changer who is able to spoof it.

So if you have applications that will only run with specific MAC address and you need to test the app, you may want to give this a try.

Although the name says Win7 you can actually get it to work on other windows, just know that you would need administrative rights for this.

Know more about Win7 MAC Changer >>

Here is a nice discovery from Ghacks.net.

In my line of work, we do require from time and again to check which are the open ports used by our server and client application.

At times for security reasons, we also want to see if there are unauthorized applications trying to send data out.

Therefore using the command line command “Netstat” is very useful.

But if you want a nice user interface app, which can

1. display all listening ports
2. display their protocol
3. display their process
4. display process ID
5. locate the executable file
6. terminate the process
7. find out on google how to close this port

then Close The Door is for you

What I like about this app is that it is portable as well so it will belong to my portable administrator’s kit.

Download CloseTheDoor to try today

Angry Birds is the definition of the most unproductive tasks that you can do. It saps up a lot of your time and you do not know when to really stop.

That said, its great that Rovio is making it available now at the Google IO to users of Chrome browsers.

To get Angry Birds on Chrome, install the extension here in your chrome browser.

Sometimes we carry out working and doing without really having a systematic idea how most effectively they can be carried out.

David Allen and Stephen Covey tried to inspire us that we need a systematic process and they provided their most effective process in Getting Things Done and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

While its most important to understand, apply and use them so that you gain the most from it, having a view of your own implementation greatly helps you and people you are trying to explain to, to understand how you do things.

In my getting things done article, I have a diagram to show you how I used to carry out getting things done with my smartphone:

My workflow here shows how ideas, thoughts and frustrations enters my system and how I systematically process them. I always go back to this diagram to keep me focus on effectively doing things.

Brett Swift, whom I got to know here from my blog also came up with one that shows how he carry out his GTD process:

How I created my flow chart

I created my flow chart with this Microsoft App called Visio. It is an industry standard to create network diagrams, software development diagrams and such. You need to pay for this.

Here is 10 reasons why you might want to get Microsoft Visio >

FREE Diagram tools

If you want to create a good looking flow chart for GTD only you might not want to spend money. There are free solutions out there.

Gliffy

Gliffy is a web 2.0 web app that does diagramming. The basic package is free but you can only have 5 public diagrams and only 2MB of upload limit.

That is quite minimal but if you only want to create one diagram you might want to sign up for this and create only one.

Diagramly

I really like diagramly because it is really no frills! They do not require you to do any form of signups. Create your diagram straight away!

Although it is a web app, you can easily create a good looking flow chart and save it as an image to publish or keep with you.

Here is what I created:

Create yours today!

You probably have procrastinated more than enough on doing things but there comes a time when you need to get things right.Why not start today?

Tune in to Productive Organizer and start with out Getting Things Done Series to make your life better today.