My husband and I met up recently for lunch and had a little planning session.
It makes my teeth hurt!
I waltzed him quick smart around to the stationers and showed him his choices : Leuchturm, Moleskine, mini Filofax, own brand knock off notebook. I could even live with a Silvine for goodness sake.
" But what would I write in it?"
All the stuff you put on crappy bits of crumpled paper!!
A few days ago noodling about the Webfinds on Philofaxy I came across the useful item that is the Frankin Covey Pouch Page Finder. Its a plastic pouch inside which you can slip an insert. ( If it was your blog please leave a link in the comments below as I forget who was writing about it now).
Hmm. How hard can it be to make something like that?
Not very. ( Although very hard to photograph! ) Here's how. You need two laminating pouches and a laminator.
1. Send a pouch through the laminator with nothing in it so you get a nice double strength plastic.
2. Cut out a piece the height you want and double the width. Dont forget that the rings mean you need it a little wider than the width of paper you want to put inside it.
3. Fold the cut out piece to form the pouch shape. It will be springy and not want to stay flat so send it through the laminator again in its folded state. The heat effectively presses it flat.
4. We now need to seal the bottom to form a pouch. To do this send another pouch through the laminator with the open edge of the pouch going through last. Insert the bottom end of your page finder into the open edge of the empty pouch just as it goes through the machine. You want to catch about a centimeter or so of the page finder between the empty pouch to seal it.
5. Trim, punch holes and cut tiny bits from between the inside edge and the holes as on a Filofax ruler and Voila! Pouch page finder.
If you want a tab you can either make the pouch longer and trim a tab from the plastic itself, or you can put the tab on your insert. I used a magnetic bookmark on mine. You can see mine still has blank paper stuck nt grey card in it. This does obscure the pages below but it occurs to me that you could print or write a list on an OHP transparency and stick it in the pagefinder to get a sort of overlay effect.
Having made it to prove I could, I now find myself considering how to use it. My initial thought before I am starting was that it was perfect for recurring tasks and goals.
But now it occurs to me that it would also be useful for planning ahead gym training sessions if you need to remember target heart rates for interval training or which weights exercises you are to do that session. Insert the training plan ahead of time and when you get to the gym, snap it out, lock the filofax in the locker and take the pouch in with you.
Or I know several people are on diets and have separate health filos. This could be a food diary in your daily planner. Ditto for people recording their daily spending and running a finance filofax.
Or it could have motivational quotes, a prayer list, a shopping list.. Anything really. What would you use it for?
But, there is an exception to every rule and I noticed that my newly acquired Crimson Malden was definately a Miss Malden and had to be set up accordingly. From the outside she is Miss Malden in the way that barristers are always called Miss by their clerks. She is neat and discrete and professional.
But, inside she is a Miss as in Driving Miss Daisy. She is vintage. Not vintage as in what used to be second hand. Vintage as in having old style grace and elegance. She is a lady still living in an antebellum manision in the Carolinas and wearing gloves to lunch. Don't ask me why. She just is. She belongs to an age gone by. And so, on the inside I dressed her accordingly with trimmed down postcards from www.zazzle.com glued o grey card.
I chose this domestic one because we often holiday in Bath.
Despite being a little less staid this one had to go in because my great friend lives near San Fran and even Miss Malden lets her hair down a little when with her girlfriends. Mint Julep anyone?
This next one makes me laugh because Blackpool these days is the last place a glamourous lady like this would go.
In good new year Philofaxy tradition I am going to show you the set up for one of the three filofaxes I will be rotating this year as my daily planner. This is the Cannot-Be-Traced Golunski brand planner. Found in TK Maxx. The others are a personal crimson Malden and a compact Regency and posts on those will follow. I hope that my quilting readers will not be put off coming here by the fact that there will be more filofax posts in 2013 ... There will be plenty of art as well to keep everyone happy. But I want the blog to reflect my whole life.
My setup up might be a bit bland and lacking in stickers and stuff, compared to many I have seen but I like it like that. Uncluttered filo means uncluttered brain in my life! The left side is my stationery store and I love that I can clip a good few pens to the first verticle pocket flap and not have them interfere with the functioning of the filo. Also here I have sticky notes, the circular stickers you will see later in use and some Cavellini Ephemera Stickers. Just sticking out from the back pocket you can see a hint of my wash tape wall.. Just strips stuck to a fly leaf so I always have some. In the past I have not decorated my filo at all but late last year I sourced some products that I thought were elegant and grown up and I like how they make the diary creative and personal but not cluttered. The front sheet is, well, plain! That was temporary but actually it provides a good foil to how busy the actual filofax design is so it may well stay. Already it has been a good place to put stickies with info which require immediate Red Flag attention as soon as I open up. Immediately behind it is a Brain Dump Page where I jot down thoughts as they fly into my head to be dealt with later. Some will relate to the filos I keep for special projects and will get transferred.
Then I have Filofax brand month in two pages tabbed as an overview. This is mostly for achieving balance between work travel and art. The green circle stickies indicate 'studio days' or days dedicated to art activities. I actually try to have studio time everyday but these show the days when I plan to dedicate a good stretch of hours to art.
Then week on a page with notes. Life is quiet this week! I use Sticky notes for tasks that need doing but not necessarily that week and which I know may well get carried over. When they become urgent they get written in properly and done. I use the notes page for travel bookings, weekly goals etc. As I say, an unusually quite week!
Next the new to me pages. For the last six months of 2013 I used self printed day on two pages from Philofaxy which Steve helped me to modify a bit. I hated them. Oh, the design was great but my ability to print them right and get them trimmed without bits sticking out was non existent. It annoyed the heck out of me. So I invested quite a bit of cash in these pages from Filofax France as they were the nearest to what I wanted. And interestingly the format has dictated some new functions which I find beneficial.
As you can see the appointments page is divided by a gap into two columns. I don't have that many appointments in my personal planner so I have been using the right column each night to do a resume of the day. This is great for spotting where time is wasted and recognising where nice but unplanned things happened. I tend to focus on what I did not get done rather than my achievements so this also encourages me to look at my day with more balance.
Having numbered to do boxes helps me not plan to do more than is reasonable. And I find that I now do as we do at work when a day is full of appointments, i.e drawing a line through the remainder of the space ( or adding a line of washi tape. No more tasks today!
The notes section I am using for my new Focus practice. I have written all about that here on my Plan • Create • Succeed blog so I will not repeat myself here save to say it is working wonderfully.
I then have a section labeled Life which has To do lists separated out by topic. If something is vital, is day senstive or just a chore it goes on the daily pages. Otherwise I choose what to do next from these options. I am deleberately viewing them as options not tasks to reduce pressure on me from feeling I MUST do all these things. They are options for how I get to spend my free time. Here is my New Year Set Up All My Filos list.
I use two magnetic bookmarks from City Organiser here. I bought them in a whim last week becuase I broke the London Skyline ruler that came with the Lineburst Filo and I missed that design from the Olympics. They work great to tab the list I am focusing on this week and move around easily.
The inal section is labelled Reminders and is bits of informational notes. nothing interesting for public consumption!
This Non-Filofax has pockets galore. For now I have used the backslots for my RAC breakdown card and European Health insurance card but also to write down on cards my overarching goals for the year any my focus words etc. Behind that is a tube map and behind that you can see the spine of a Moleskine Volante notebook I am using as a sketchbook. More on that in another post. There is a full width pocket behind the rings too which is empty at the moment. For a personal this is the best design for quanity and capacity of pockets. I love it but I am glad I have others I love that I can rotate with it because I dread it wearing out! i am sure I will add stuff as the year goes on.
Oh and finally the pen. The pen loop on this requires a very slim pen. I was recommended on Philofaxy to look at the Cross Centrury pens so I went to Rymans to see if they had one. They did and it was the same size as these white pens but far more expensive. These are I confess I little tacky with their swarovski crystal on the top but only a little, and the barrel is really nice. Besides, as they take Cross refils but the whole pen costs less than the cross refills I overcame my snobbery and bought several! No bleed though=happy writer!