A5 Day Per Page Business Style Diary

I bought an A5 Day Per Page (Business Style) diary insert a couple of weeks ago at a vastly reduced price of £1.00!!! It was in clearance sale in a store in UK I was visiting the other week.  OK it was five months in to the year, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to try out this format to see if it worked for me or not.

I think you will agree that you can look at a blank diary until you are 'blue in the face'... but until you try it for a few days you have no idea if it will work for you or not... or is it just me...

The other thing I should mention at this stage is that I've never used a page per day diary of any sort before now. So this trial was voyage in to the unknown.

So what is in this diary insert? So starting at the front:

• 2011 Calendar 
• 2010 and 2012 Calendars
• Personal Information
• Notable Dates 2011
• Religious Festivals 2011
• European Union Members 2011 (Country, Capital, Currency, Time Zone, Dialling in and out, National Holidays)
• International Information 2011(Country, Capital, Currency, Time Zone, Dialling in and out, National Holidays)
• Weights and Measures (conversion factors)
• The World and Time
• World Temperature Guide
• Clothing Size Equivalents - It seems I'm big in any size where ever you are!
• Expenses record (2 pages)
• Meeting Planner (2 pages)
• Delegation Review (2 pages)
• ToDo (2 pages)
• Birthdays, Anniversaries and Special Occasions 
• The Diary it self which is page per day Monday to Friday and a single page for Saturday and Sunday. 

So most of the above content is common to most diary inserts, so I will concentrate on the diary pages themselves. 

So note that this format is only in English, which I prefer as the other languages tend to clutter the page in my opinion. International holidays are indicated with the country code under the day.  A small monthly calendar block appears on each page. The Week number and the days in to the year and the number of days until the end of the year also appear in the header.

Today, gives you somewhere to add general notes, birthdays and other 'all day' events.

Then in the left hand column you have your appointment schedule from 07:00 - 19:00 hours, but with some blank space below for later appointments.  There is also a tick column to check off things during the day.

Moving over to the right hand column it starts with To Do/Notes,  then Phone/Correspondence, Tasks to Delegate and finally Personal Reminders.

Saturday and Sunday are similar, but there are no specific times in the Appointment Schedule and there is only the To Do/Notes. There is however, still the same header information.

So I've mocked up a couple of pages to show you how I'm using this diary insert

So firstly ignore the fact that it's on pages from February... no it's not warm enough for a BBQ in February!

The appointment schedule is fairly self explanatory. The To Do list I really like, I add to these lists during the day. Tasks that need to be done that done that day I add an * in the left column. Tasks that I complete get ticked. Ones that don't get completed are copied over to the next day.  I put non-critical tasks at the foot of the To Do list.

I occasionally include the weather that day in the Today notes as well as our swimming pool temperature.

Overall I'm very pleased with the way this insert works for me, having the to-do list visible every day is a big bonus for me. Looking back through the past days I can see at a glance from the tasks completed, I can see what I was doing each day and how long it took me to get around to doing something if a task is copied over from one day to the next continuously.  I also write in tasks that I do that I hadn't put in the list to start with, a lot of satisfaction from seeing things ticked off!

I'm not sure if I'm using this insert as the designer intended, or in true GTD style, but as with all of these things you can easily adapt them over time.

I have the diary set up in my A5 Malden, so it sits next to me on my desk all the time.  So I will be ordering my A5 Page per Day insert for 2012 soon.