Finding Philofaxy

To help celebrate Philofaxy's 10 year anniversary, I thought I'd write about how I got into Filofaxes and came across Philofaxy.

After purchasing David Allen's book Getting Things Done in 2009, I spent some time working out which system would work best for me and finally settled on using pen and paper. I started searching online for 'refillable notebook' and after some more thought, this became 'leather refillable notebook'. Unsurprisingly, Filofax started showing in the results and I eventually found my way to Philofaxy. To be honest, I didn't read very much of the blog to begin with and I think I was a bit surprised at that point that so much could be written about the subject...

I was going to buy a black Metropol, but still had some money left over from my birthday, so I finally chose a cherry personal Classic and eagerly awaited its arrival. I had only vaguely heard of Filofax before as they were something that the Yuppies used to use, and I have a suspicion that the relatively high price (compared with your average notebook) would have put me off previously. However, it made sense for me to set up my GTD system in something that was:

1. Refillable
2. Durable
3. Something nice to help encourage me to use it.  

After initially setting up my Classic, I actually didn't visit Philofaxy very often as I was just using my Filofax and getting on with stuff. However, after about 13 months of gentle use my Classic started to show some strange bubbling/cracking near the spine and searching for the issue brought me back to here for advice. I hadn't purchased my filo from Filofax and it was over a year old, so I was pretty disappointed and figured I was stuck with it. However, on reader advice I contacted Filofax UK and they requested that I return it and was delighted when they offered to replace it free of charge. The replacement arrived and sadly the ring mechanism had become detached, so it was returned. In the meantime, I had kinda fallen in love with the Maldens (from reading posts here), so I figured it was worth asking if I could have one as my replacement instead as they were of a similar value. I felt very lucky as the answer was yes and I was then the proud owner of a new crimson Malden.

I think that it was around that time that I finally 'got' Philofaxy. What a revelation that there was a product that suited my needs so well, and that there was a community of like-minded people out there. I have always loved stationery, but it's generally been something people have made fun of, so it was wonderful to find others like me. In 2012, I contacted Steve to ask if they were interested in having another contributor join the team and was thrilled when the answer came back with a 'yes'. I don't contribute as often as I'd like to (life seems to get in the way sometimes), but I love writing posts for the site and feel very grateful for being part of such a friendly and supportive online community.