It's been so long since I've posted to Philofaxy, it feels a little strange. I want to thank all of the readers who've been commenting on recent posts. Thank you for your input, and for inspiring me to keep the blog alive. My absence has been due in part to getting burned out at work last year (and it feels really good to use the word "last" here), to a temporary addiction to something called Facebook, and to, frankly, a lack of news. It's easy to write about Filofax angst when you're choosing between sizes and formats. I had settled into a stable Filofax system in 2007, and eventually there wasn't much to write about.
I spent the time between Christmas and New Year's setting up new refills in my 3 Filos -- A5 for work, A5 for household, and Personal for personal. The biggest change was in Personal, when I went from week-per-2-pages to 2-days per page. As you can see in this picture, the new, white diary pages (bottom) take up a much bigger portion of the book. I had to cull quite a few other pages to make room.
But I'm enjoying the extra room on each page. Now I have room to write down more than "pay electric bill." I have room to write down the confirmation number when I pay the bill online. I have time to note addresses and directions. There's also a 1/2 page each week called Notes, which I've used so far for to-dos that don't have to be done on a specific day, and notes that go beyond a confirmation number.
I've also changed my tabs in the Personal: They're now Projects, Maybe, Ideas, Lists, Life, and Tel. The Projects section is for truly personal projects, like get-togethers with friends, holidays, and vacations. Maybe stands for "maybe do" and holds to-do pages. It's for Web sites I want to look up, people I want to get back in touch with, products I might want to order, and so on. Ideas may not sound very different from Maybe, but it is. It's for ideas that go beyond a single to-do. Cities I want to visit each have a page under ideas, as do Web sites I want to develop and articles I want to write. It's actually a pretty fallow section at the moment. Lists is an alphabetical collection of lists; mostly shopping/gift lists alphabetized by venue. Life is an oddball name, I know. It's actually a euphemism for diet and exercise records. It makes sense to me.
Has anyone else done any tweaking for the new year?
After a while using notebooks, I brought back my Pocket Lyndhurst, but found it too big. I replaced it with a Mini Guildford, which is working out pretty well.
ReplyDeleteI'm toying with moving my tasks and notes into Emacs Org, but still using the Filofax for scribbling away from the computer.
I finally settled on the Cotton Cream week on 2 pages as my calendar for 2008. I use a Personal size Filo, and since I'm a SAHM this works for home, travel (which is frequent, an international trip every 2-3 months with the whole family), personal, etc etc etc. This seemed like it would work pretty well for me this year. Then, in a sudden decision, everything is turned on its head as we prepare to move back to the US from overseas. In 8 weeks. So now we have to pack up our house, arrange for everything (including our car) to be shipped overseas, search for a house and job in the US when we are 8 time zones away...you get the picture. Suddenly the task load has increased exponentially. And just as suddenly, my Personal sized week on a page no longer has enough space. The days get quickly overfilled and the tasks overflow onto post-it notes stuck around the margins of the pages. So now I use my calendar and to-do lists in my bigger planner, which is not quite as big as the largest size Filo. It has a glorious layout: the top left quadrant is a month-at-a-view calendar; the top right quadrant has two separate lists for To Do and To Call, and across the bottom half is the weekly calendar Monday through Sunday as columns. There is lots of space to write, and it helps my forward planning to see my week, month, and to-dos all in one view. This is actually a Go Mom Classic size planner (which has loads of information pages, great for families), but I use it when I have something big coming up that requires a lot of forward-planning. So I feel a little split having my calendar in one binder and all my information/ addresses/ lists etc in my Filo. But, I'm not carrying these around anywhere, they are just on my desk, so it's not that big a deal.
ReplyDeleteA Happy New Year to you and all Philofaxy readers and contributors! My one and only Filofax system tweak has been to switch my diary pages from "two pages to a week multi language white" to "two pages to a week in cream". My theory was that this would be easier on the eye and I could benefit from the "this week" box for goals for the week. This has been a failure on both counts because I can't read the date without glasses and I haven't got used to looking in the top left hand corner and hence miss my cues. It's early days though; it took me ages to get used to the Filofax though I wouldn't be without it now.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you had a "temporary addiction to something called Facebook" for I also got dragged into this by a former work colleague. I could see it had endless time wasting possibilities and my page never moved from being utilitarian. Philofaxy on the other hand has always been a good read. I'm glad you're back.
Thanks for your comments, Michael, Laurie, and Andrzej!
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