Exploring busy bees, solitude, and advising friends

Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!

What’s inside?

• One tool to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

_{One tool to experiment with:}

Busy Bees:

How often do you say you’re busy?

Busy has been our scape goat for why we don’t have time for things:

• Too busy to think about money

• Too busy to plan retirement

• Too busy to think in general

We’ve all become busy bees. We fly around and complete task after task and try to catch our breath at day’s end.

“I’m so busy” has become our tired anthem. When we hear a fellow busy bee bark these words, we understand. We acknowledge their grind and accept the “reason” the real work remains incomplete.

The reality goes back to the core theme of the focus funnel — you get what you aim at.

For us busy bees, tackling tasks feels good. We scratch items off the to-do list, we feel the forward progress of stacking a lot of completions up, and we assume the problem is the number of hours in a day. But stacking many tasks matters less than stacking the important tasks.

If your one task is to set up a retirement account, doing 100 little tasks around the house won’t open the account. Sure, you were productive. But you weren’t effective. That’s the busy trap. Escape it.

I often find myself most productive when I have an important task to complete, when I need to be effective. The procrastination is like an aversion to moving the real weight.

Your one task shouldn’t be hard to find. The task that requires your current attention, the one to pull you out of the busy bee trap is the one you keep pushing off. It’s the one you’ll openly apply the busy bee response toward. And take a second and ask yourself, “What am I communicating when I toss these words in the air?” The impossibility of my circumstances? The struggle to find margin? An excuse?

Don’t let busy rationalize why you’re not doing something. Change the phrasing. You’re not too busy, you just haven’t prioritized it. It’s a subtle change, and an honest one.

_{Two quotes on solitude:}

Solitude to think and build are critical elements of your financial path.

_{Three questions on advising a friend:}

1. How would I advise a friend to handle this situation?

2. What piece of this puzzle is my friend not seeing?

3. What would I tell them to work on today to improve this situation?

Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.

_{Four lines of poetry for the point:}

Contact Me:

Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]