This week on Bucks, the whole Your Money gang is laying out their financial resolutions for 2012. On Tuesday, Ann Carrns wrote about the paper savings bonds in her closet. I’ve got two things on my mind.

First, there’s the money value of my time. In 2012, I want to waste less time looking for things. For whatever reason, few things cause me more anxiety than having to storm around my apartment or cube at work trying to find my wallet or a story file from six months ago. It causes my blood to feel as if it’s literally boiling.

The waste is itself nearly quantifiable. All of that time (and it happens many times each week) I spend looking for something could be put toward some other work project that would allow me to be a better performer, with a higher ceiling on my compensation. Or I could spend it instead with my wife or my child, which is worth a lot, too.

But disorganization also makes me mad at myself, for not being the kind of person who knows where everything is all the time. That frustration, alas, often carries over into the next activity, and it’s distracting. I should lighten up, I know, but it would probably be easier just to not lose stuff in the first place.

So now my keys and wallet and headphones and gym bag all have a specific place. The lock has a specific place in the gym bag, too. And (thanks, admittedly, to the exhortations of the New York Times Business section’s chief administrative officer) I now have a much cleaner work area. Progress, already.

As for actual dollars, I’ve finally set up subaccounts at the online savings bank ING Direct. There are about 10 of them, one for every spending item that my household doesn’t spend money on regularly each month: out-of-town travel, car repairs, taxes from freelance income, camp for the child.

In February, I plan to automate things so that the ING accounts pull the budgeted amount of money over from our main checking account each month. Then, when we need it, we can manually put it back to pay bills. That way, we know the money is gone and isn’t available for day-to-day needs — but it’s there once we do need it many months from now.

One wild card here: Capital One, ING Direct’s new owner, could decide it needs to “enhance” its new acquisition and get rid of the subaccounts or make them less useful. So here’s a resolution I hope the data-driven executives there take up for themselves:

Do not mess with our ING subaccounts.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c9b635a33f1101a577e6452eb22e8db7