While we don’t get there 100%, though, I would argue that my program at Babson College gets closer than most other schools:

• Unlike traditional programs organized around a semester system, Babson eschews stand-alone courses for integrated, just in time knowledge delivery. Our first year is organized to follow the life-cycle of an archetypal corporation: evaluating the opportunity, assembling the team, developing the plan, securing funding, expanding operations, and becoming global. Subject matter such as finance, operations, and law are combined.
• Real-world experience is explicitly integrated. Every first-year student is required to complete a year-long consulting project for a local company. Many (if not most) second year students engage in unpaid, for-credit work projects: managing teams of undergrads, consulting for area businesses, managing the school’s endowment, or starting a business in the school’s incubator.

Babson is the entrepreneurship school. Most students don’t start their own companies but the focus throughout our two years is on identifying and realizing opportunities. For employers who primarily want someone to do valuations, or design marketing plans, of do cost accounting, we might not be the best choice. But for the sorts of businesspeople Seth Godin imagines, Babson could be just the right program.

If all you need is letter-sized note paper, PDF Pad has you covered with graph paper, note paper, musical staffs, and more. There’s also lifehack.org’s version, and Simson Garfinkel has one as well (if needed, rename index.cgi to something with the PDF extension). Finally, for goofy or unusual templates, check out the graphc organizers section on the Houghton-Mifflin Education Place site.

View from the top:

View at the bottom:

Plenty of runoff from the top:

Crazy knocked-down tree:

The colors were crazy. This is looking south, towards central Massachusetts:

Closeup of the colors:

Uploaded by OPHOTN on 22 Dec ’05, 8.12pm PST.

But if you look at most successful entrepreneurs, they exhibit many of these characteristics too. They can’t focus on anything for long periods of time, but they lunge into new stuff with a voracious appetite to figure it out.

I don’t know about the clinical side of this disorder. I am sure that there are many cases where the disorder is terribly disabling. But I really wonder if a moderate amount of ADD is a bad thing. I think it may in fact be a good thing. It’s certainly a trait I have come to know and love in entrepreneurs.

This is good news for me! I wouldn’t mind having to ask Fred for money one day, or a job, and if bringing along an official diagnosis can help, so much the better.

But the ADD has a dangerous and scary side. Our first term at Babson just ended and we had to write a short paper – 6 pages – reflecting on our experience and the process of learning. Or we could hand in something creative. I had five perfectly good pages typed out last night before bed. This morning I scrapped it all in favor of a slide show/presentation. Is it better now? More expressive? More passionate? Sure! Will it meet my professor’s expectations? We’ll see….

As school begins, maintaining the exercise routine will be critical. There’s considerable evidence that for people like myself with ADHD, learning and attention are improved with exercise, particularly vigorous exercise.

In sixteen hours we leave for two weeks in Israel and Italy – a last hurrah before an MBA and a PhD in Social Work. While we’re both getting an extremely generous amount of assistance, money will be tight over the text few years and I’ve been wondering what tools the Internet provides for keeping track of our cash.

A while back, Lifehacker asked about good tools for budgeting. Perhaps not surprisingly, most users suggested Excel or other spreadsheet tools. Spreadsheets have the advantages of flexibility and ad hoc reuse. With the advent of Google Spreadsheets, Zoho Sheet, and other similar online tools the primary disadvantage–locking the user to a single computer–has been obviated.

Other commenters suggested Mvelopes, a full featured cash and financial management application, and Snowmint Budget, a desktop budgeting application. These both are based on the envelope budgeting methodology–fine if that’s what you want to follow but not so flexible for the rest of us.

PearBudget is a neat tool built in Excel that combines budget setting with budget tracking, but requires you to save and transcribe receipts. It looks like they’re working on a web version.

The downsides of these web and computer tools–that you need to be at a computer to use them–may be addressed by Filo, a printable expense register. Perhaps this (or any other paper-based expense tracker) could be combined with Pearbudget to avoid having to carry around receipts.

Some tools aren’t designed to help you track your spending. Instead, they motivate you to save. The Lunch Savings Calculator is one example: by being a cheap bastard with my PB&J I can save over $1000 a year!

If your problem is paying bills on time, perhaps reminder services like billQ would, erm, fit the bill.

The problem with most of these solutions are that they don’t provide the full solution set (building a budget, tracking expenses, and measuring performance), lock you in to a proprietary platform, and require that you physically be at a computer. My requirements would be:

• Ability to set budget categories, amounts, and time frames arbitrarily
• Ability to record expenses as they happen with little or no data reentry
• Ability to generate reports showing actuals vs. budgeted, where the money’s going, etc.
• Live access to budgeting an expense data in a structured format like XML for analysis wherever and however I like

Unfortunately, I have yet to find what I want. Lifehacker has a clever trick that accomplishes some of what I want–they hack up some Perl scripts to interface with AIM to allow users to instant message or SMS their expenses. Ubiquity is provided, and the data is accessible as a local text file, but it’s hardly convenient for the non-techies among us.

Finally, we must not be the only ones stressing about money. Also via Lifehacker is Oprah’s Debt Diet.

The best book I’ve read about managing money is the Five Rituals of Wealth. It teaches that wealth comes from the discipline to know where your money is spent.