A Slow-Tech Approach to Tracking Spending

The New York Times:

Last week, Psychological Science published a study about how well students recall a lecture if they type the notes or write them longhand. While the students who typed could take more notes, they didn’t perform as well on conceptual questions. The researchers showed that the typists took notes verbatim, while the writers processed what they heard and then wrote the ideas in their own words. The writers could better remember the message because they’d actually processed what it meant.

I think something similar happens when we try to automate our budgeting process. Pulling in all our purchases automatically sounds an awful lot like typing notes verbatim. The result is a technically correct reflection of how our spending compares with our budget, but we miss the chance to process what the numbers mean. The act of looking at each receipt and adding those numbers ourselves mimics the act of hearing something and then putting it in our own words. We know where the money went, and, hopefully, we know why.

Read the whole story: The New York Times