I love to organize. And I love being organized. Actually I think I’m a little obsessive with organization but that’s okay. Along those same lines I’m a total neat freak. The first thing I did last night when I got home from work was clean the house. It’s weird I know, but there is nothing better than a clean house to start the weekend.

My sister-in-law, Christina, inspired me through a couple of her blog posts to organize a few things in my life. Since I didn’t have much on my schedule today I decided it would be a great day for some organizing!

I got up a little before 6am. This was partly due to a hungry dog and partly because I’m weird and I get up really early on the weekends. By 7am I had my mint.com account set up and all my bank/cc/investment info loaded. Setting up a mint.com account is something I have been thinking about doing for a while but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. To see where I got my inspiration to set this up check out Christina’s post.

I went for a run at 7:30 this morning. I had 5 easy miles + 4 x 8 sec hill sprints on my schedule today. I have to run early on Saturday’s because I go to a yoga class at 9am and I like to run before the class. Today was the first time I have run 5 miles before yoga. Usually I only run 3-4 miles. Let me tell you, yoga was hard today after running 5 miles! It’s always a challenging class, but today it was really hard.

After yoga I made some steel-cut oats and sat down with my computer to see how mint.com works. Currently I use Quicken to keep track of all my accounts. I like it but I don’t think the budget part of Quicken is very easy to use. It looks like budgeting on mint.com will be a lot easier. I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep using both programs or choose one or the other.

I must say, I need to start paying attention to how much I’m spending on groceries! Holy smokes. I shop a Market of Choice which is definitely more expensive than other grocery stores. But I think if I pay attention to sales and plan our meals more efficiently I can reduce the amount I spend on groceries. I’m excited to keep track of my spending next month.

Next, I accomplished my second organizational goal of the day which was to set up Time Machine on my computer and back everything up on my hard drive. Prior to a couple of weeks ago I didn’t have Time Machine (because I had an old operating system on my computer) so I backed up all my files and photos manually. It’s a long story as to why I installed Snow Leopard so I will spare you the details.

While my computer was backing up I did my taxes! Last year I waited until the last minute. I wanted to finish my taxes today but I don’t have one of my 1099′s and won’t have it until the middle of February. Frustrating. But at least I’m almost done!

My third organizational goal was to purchase a fire proof safe to store my hard drive and important documents like our passports and birth certificates. I should have done this a long time ago. After reading Christina’s post about backing things up and reading this post on a house that burned down I decided to get the safe. I used to keep my hard drive about a foot away from my computer. Not smart.

My Saturday was productive! Now I’m going to do some reading.

I’ll leave you with a photo of my afternoon snack. A banana + strawberry + peach + rice milk smoothie.