Budgeting by post-it notes

I have decided that i need to be a lot tighter with my spending and budgeting. Not that i am hard-up or anything but in October i am going to need to be able to afford my MA course fees so i thought it time to restore a bit of fiscal discipline to my affairs. Most moneys that go out of my account are fairly predictable being existing direct debits which i have listed on a spreadsheet however food and stuff bought for myself is different and sometimes it is hard to track how much i have spent on food and CDs et cetera every month.

Therefore i have begun an experiment where all spending in the food and (what i term) media areas will be noted on the wall over my computer using post-it notes. I decided to use post-its instead of yet another spreadsheet so i don't have to turn the computer on to know where i am.

So yellow post-its for media and orange for food. Each post-it is marked with the amount spent, the date and a few details on what was bought. This means i can at a glance see how much i have spent in either area and see how much of both is still remaining from my allocated budget. This hopefully will stop me going over budget and restore a bit of discipline to these areas. Maybe the government should try budgeting by post-it notes too, if it works of course.