Making a budget is the first step of financial control. Check off each step along the way as you complete it! It’s a step-by-step plan for getting your financial life in order and making progress on your financial goals. Stay accountable with our Organize Your Finances Todoist Template. Follow these steps to build a budget, free up your valuable mental space, get a handle on your finances, and finally have a tool to reach your financial goals. There’s some good news: you can take the same systematic approach you’ve learned with Todoist and apply it to your financial life. You might be someone with the opposite problem: you’ve already brought order to your daily tasks thanks to Todoist-but for you, managing your money still feels like an exhausting, draining mess. And that made all the difference: Todoist freed up my valuable mental space, and I am eternally grateful. Not only was I able to get everything done, but I didn’t have to think about all the things I had to do anymore. With time, and a little trial and error, I was able to put all these things in order. It was that I was constantly thinking about everything I had to do.

And it wasn’t so much that I had too much to do. There was always something to clean or a small human who needed a snack. Yes, my life had gotten better, but there was also a lot more to do. I welcomed my second child into the world. I had started my job at YNAB teaching people how to budget, which not only gave me meaningful work, but let me work from home! I had settled into a new house. In fact, things had improved dramatically in the prior years. Sometime during the summer of 2017, I woke up to realize that my life had become pretty complicated.

With that, I’ll turn it over to Ben from YNAB… I’ve experienced the productive power of budgeting in my own life, and I hope this guide helps you do the same, in 2023 and beyond.

I’ve been using YNAB (short for You Need a Budget) almost as long as I’ve been using Todoist, so when the opportunity arose to partner up and help our readers organize their finances, I jumped at the chance. It may seem counterintuitive, but budgeting has helped me think about money less, freeing up precious mental space for the things that are important to me. A note from Ambition & Balance editor Becky Kane: It’s really hard to make progress on your other goals when you’re stressed about money.

How to organize your life and finances