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Several years ago, Car and Driver had an excellent article about how car companies put in a lot of extra effort to engineer the right “new car smell.” The goal? They want that smell to feel both exciting and comforting, encouraging the car buyer to both desire the smell when they’re shopping and to enjoy it while it lasts after the purchase.

That “new car smell” is carefully engineered. In fact, you can actually buy spray bottles of “new car smell” for your own car. Car dealerships use that stuff all the time in their cars to create that sense of freshness and appeal when you’re shopping for a car.

My biggest dreaded personal finance task is filing papers. I absolutely loathe it.

For starters, it’s a never-ending task. There are seemingly always more papers that need to be saved somewhere.

If I happen to get behind a little bit, the pile of papers that need to be filed becomes a small mountain. I just want to shove that big pile in a filing cabinet somewhere and just forget about them… which sounds great until you actually need a particular paper, then you’re spending hours digging through reams of documents trying to find one item.

I simply don’t enjoy it. If I can find an easy excuse, I put it off, and then I regret doing so because the pile of papers gets overwhelming.

I’ve really only found one way that makes all of this work for me. I break it down into tiny, tiny tasks and just do one task a day.

Just the other day, I was sitting at my favorite local library (if you happen to go there at the right time, you’ll probably find me sitting at a table with a notebook open in front of me with several personal finance, career, time management, and self-improvement books piled around me). I was browsing through a personal finance book – I’m not sure which one, but I’m pretty sure it was focused on retirement – and something caught my eye.

Within two paragraphs, the writer seemed to be using the words saving and investing completely interchangeably. I read the paragraphs a few times and I simply couldn’t find any difference in how the author was using the two words.

If I had to point to one idea that really shook my financial thinking and showed me the value of turning my finances around, it was the concept of exchanging my life’s energy for money, as explained in the wonderful book Your Money or Your Life.

The idea is actually pretty simple on the surface. One of the big arguments in the book is that people trade pieces of their life’s energy for money. Almost every way that people earn income involves exchanging at least some mental or physical energy for that money.

It doesn’t take much imagination to expand that trade to time as well. We trade our time and our energy for money. Whenever we pick up our keys and head off to work, we’re swapping time for money. We wouldn’t (usually) go to work without that financial compensation.