Minimalist Filofax

When you get an organiser it is very easy to fill it up with different pages. Of course the bigger the rings the heavier and bulkier it becomes. But how much of it do you really need on a daily basis?

Before you throw your hands up in horror at the thought of removing things, give it a bit of thought.

Now at this time of year a lot of people will have a new 12 months of diary insert already loaded. Some of us try to be more economical with the number of months we carry at any one time, a rolling 6 months or 4 months, sometimes the last month and the next 3 months. Updating the contents on a monthly basis.

Some people add in monthly pages and may be a year planner to supplement their daily or weekly pages for their more detailed planning.

As well as your planner pages what else are you carrying in your organiser? Do you need all of it all of the time?

OK lots of thoughts and questions. As you might know my main organiser is an A5 Filofax which tends to live on my desk, always open at the current week. I've reduced the contents of this organiser so I can use a mixture of A5 organisers with either 25 or 30 mm rings or at a push in the 20 mm rings of my Malden iPad organiser. So that one is fairly constant now.

However, I also use another organiser which I carry with me outside of the house. But what do I really need if I'm only away from the house for a few hours?

So this got me thinking, and I thought about not limiting myself to just personal size, could pocket size do the same task as the personal?

So what do I need at an absolute minimum in terms of the contents for a minimalist organiser.

I sat and looked through my current personal size set up, I removed the pages from the organiser and laid them out in neat stacks for each section on my desk.

I started off with just my week per page diary inserts and some pages of note paper. This left out all my contact information. This reduced the page count to less than 50 pages. Well within the limits of my slimline Holborn, shown on the left in the picture below.

I continued to try different combinations, and if I needed key phone numbers I could add in the A-Z telephone dividers out of the slimline and this would still fit in the slimline or the compact shown on the right in the photo above.

I was having too much fun rearranging things. Let's go a step further shall we. I had been sent a sample of a week per page + notes for pocket size. Things would be even more compact in that, even if the diary side of things might be a little limiting in terms of how many appointments I could comfortably fit on a single day.

So I'm going to try carrying the pocket set up when I go to French class the smaller size will certainly help in my bag which has to fit a large dictionary in it. The rest of the time I will see how I get on with the compact size again.

I will be restoring things in to my full size personal for longer trips away from home.