Guest post: My Filofax A5 planner setup - Lisa

This post has been a looooooong time coming.

First up, I don’t know exactly how I got lost in my obsession for planners, and everything planner related.

However, I do know that it started in October when I was in Japan. I guess being overseas gives you time to think about things, and I was thinking about things I needed to do when I got home. This led to thinking about how to plan said things, which lead to thinking how I don’t like using my iPhone calendar anymore as I am sick of reminders constantly going off and I never do what they reminding me of.

I was at the point where I was ready to start planning my life properly. I was already in the process of moving away from using my iPhone calendar and going back to an old school paper and pen diary to plan my personal life and blog posts. However, it was heavy to carry around, and I still wasn’t using it properly.

So all this thinking led to research, which led to learning about how people plan, which led to the wide, wide world of Filofax love and decoration, which led to writing a post about planning to plan. So now it’s finally time to move forward from the planning to the actual doing.

After frantically looking for a planner in Japan to no avail, I ordered a Filofax A5 Calipso organiser in purple on Amazon.

After watching many YouTube videos, reading blog posts, and looking at Filofax communities, I’ve finally started to set my planner up.

Here’s how I’ve set it up

Planner pockets

My Filofax has six card sleeves and a pouch at the front, and a zipped pouch at the back.

The only section I use is the pouch at the front, which holds my calendar legend (shown in the image below and discussed in detail later) and bills. I don’t think I’ll use the other sections as I don’t want to add too much bulk to my planner.

Dashboard

This is the first thing you see when you open my planner.

It’s something that I saw a lot of when I was doing research on how to set my planner up.

I don’t intend on using any of the items on my dashboard, they’re basically there to pretty my planner up.

Categories

At this stage I have five categories or areas that I’ll be using my planner for. Each category is identified by decorative scrapbook paper, which I cut to size and have inserted into an A5 plastic sleeve.

Below are the categories that I have. I already have the feeling that some will be replaced with something else, which I’ll work out once I start using my planner properly.

• Calendar
• Blog
• OLW
• Lists
• Expenses

Calendar

The inserts are from Kikki K and are a month to a page and a week to two pages.

I use the month page to plot out blog posts, and the weekly pages to show what’s happening each day.

I colour code each area that needs to be put on my weekly pages, the legend detailing the colours is stored in the pouch at the front of my planner, and can be seen on the image of the dashboard.

My area’s colour codes are:

• Peach – blog
• Blue – personal
• Green – garden
• Yellow – meals planned for dinner
• Orange – grocery shopping
• Birthday washi – birthdays
• Purple – health and work

When I put something on my weekly pages I use washi tape in the corresponding colour instead of writing them in pen. As I’m always rescheduling things it’s much neater to move things around when they’re on washi tape, as opposed to crossing it out if they’re written in pen. There is the occasional thing that I may write in pen, but this doesn’t happen often.

Blog

I will use this section to write down any blog post ideas that I have, or to store any magazine inspiration that I find.

OLW

OLW stands for one little word, which is how I set goals for my year. If you’d like to learn more about this please click here.

This year my one little word is focus. I intend to use this section to write down my focus goals, and write down anything focus orientated that will keep me inspired.

I have already made an insert with my focus goals on it, which will always be in my current weekly page.  You can view this in the image below.

Lists

I’m crazy for lists, so this section will definitely stay.

At the moment I have the following lists:

• Garden
• House
• To buy
• Sunday
• Day trips
• Favourite restaurants
• Restaurants to try

Each list has items on it that need doing. For example, some of the things on my garden list include plant herbs, work on shed path, and mulch side of house.

Eventually everything on each of list will be transferred to my weekly calendar and ticked off the list. New things will be added to each list as they come up.

Expenses

This year one of my one little word goals is to focus on being financially responsible. I’m hoping to track my expenses in this section to allow me to do this.

Decoration

A big part of the Filofax community is planner decoration, which is not only fun, but also keeps you motivated to actually use your planner.

I’m hoping to get better at this, and will be posting each month on what I have done for that month in terms of decoration. I’ll also show weekly photos of this on my Instagram account.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use a planner please visit my Filofax Planner Love Pinterest page

In the meantime, I’d love to hear how you plan out your days.

Thank you Lisa for your guest post, we really appreciate people sharing posts like this on Philofaxy. 

Be sure to visit Lisa's blog The Creative Canvass