A personal stylist inspired this money hack

When I heard Jen, founder of Everyday Style , talk about ‘hunting’ for clothes versus ‘gathering’ them, I couldn’t help wonder if I could apply the approach to money.

While people spend a lot of time thinking about what they wear, few pay attention to how clothes come into their lives .  While there is some sort of acquisition process, the approach isn’t usually examined.  It just happens, the personal stylist explained.

But what would all of us notice if we took a moment to stop and think about our buying habits?   We might, as Jen said, see we are either ‘hunters’ – people who shop for what they need, perhaps once a season and then they’re done – or ‘gatherers’ – people who are constantly searching for new clothes that their eye, but with no particular item in mind.  Unlike the former, gatherers don’t use lists and browsing is never-ending.

Noodling about attention

The obvious link to money – that hunters likely spend less time shopping and as a result probably spend less money too – isn’t what made me think. It was the resulting impact on hunters’ overall aesthetic that got me noodling.  Because hunters are in charge of their attention, they tend to achieve the desired result of a shopping trip done well. They typically look more put together than gatherers and have a wardrobe that’s intentional and practical in all the right ways.

Where and how often we direct our attention is often key to executing tasks as well as  achieving goals – this doesn’t just apply to consumption.  Psychologists and neuroscientists have long known that attention drives action and the directions given to our attention matter a great deal. 

Instructions can come from either endogenous sources  – when what you focus on is directed internally, e.g. when you shop with a list and your target items are specific and self-directed – or exogenous – where the things you pay attention to are dictated by external factors and by whatever catches your eye.

Positive direction

Marketers LOVE coaxing consumers into using their exogenous attention. While using shopping lists and detailed budgets do have a place in our retaining control, they aren’t always practical or easy to stick to because you can often feel as though you’re going without. What’s needed is a tactic that’s both positive and directional – an easy-to-implement approach that amplifies aims and glosses over what we are giving up to achieve them.  

After listening  to Jen and doing a bit of research, my hunch was that a time and goals-driven approach to budgeting should do the trick. By using time as a proxy for how much attention I’d give to tasks and by deciding that how I spent my time had to align with my big picture goals (the kind you see on vision boards), my crude hypothesis was that I would be less suseptible to outside persuasion and drift.

The results

My experiment worked!  And it didn’t take much effort or discipline, either.

I updated my budget for March – something that I had resolved to do in my Sunday Reset – and at the start of each day I simply wrote down my overarching goal for the day along with a list of specific tasks that I had to complete and prioritised them. Wherever I was able to I would I tackle my jobs in the order of their importance or relevance to my goal.

Since it’s still early days with my business and I am new to being my own boss, the core goal that I chose to give most of my time (aka attention) to was putting a strong foundation in place for future me.  This included working on my website’s search engine optimisation and studying for a course that I’m due to start later this month.  I I deprioritized random days out and gave myself a spending limit of a tenner a day.

Since I’ve been using this hack, I’ve noticed that my time and goals-driven approach to my daily budget has helped me to:

·       Exclude excessive scrolling

·       Decrease unintentional spending

·       Boost my creativity and the number of ideas that I’m generating for content and client outreaach

·       Be more productive; and

·       Not exceed the daily spending allowance that I set, while still enjoying myself.

How you can use this hack

I love the spending hack that Jen, host of the Everyday Style School podcast, inspired me to come up with.  It’s quick, simple and malleable, and I am still using it because I find that pledging to work on my most important goal gives me greater control of my attention, time and money.

Try it out if you’re struggling to stay on track with your budget or your goals. For example, you could go through your spending for the past three months and try to identify 3-5 things that you’ll no longer buy because these things just aren’t important to you. You could also try re-framing decisions to cut back.E.g. Buying coffee out is a bad habit of mine and it’s a habit that I have to try really hard to curb. My resolve usually wavers if I just tell myself ‘no’. But, if I allow myself one coffee out a day to catch up with friends or because getting a change of scene will help me work and regain my focus, then that’s okay. The boundary then becomes not straying beyond my buying one coffee out a day limit.