25 November 2021

Using more than one organiser?

I was looking back through some old posts and came across a very cryptically titled 'Two Filofax Morton...' from November 2013. 


In that post as you will see, I was outlining how I was using two organisers, an A5 and a Personal size to organise my life. A few years later I stopped that practice and swapped back to just one, the A5. 

In the past, in discussion with others this topic has come up of should you use more than one organiser or not. I had my own reasons at the time, but things change over time and I'm now a firm believer in just using one to organiser to run my life. 

With a lot of people still working 'at home' I wonder if people that previously had an organiser dedicated to their work activities and a separate one for their home life have also amalgamated them in to one organiser? 

In my case it was the duplication of the calendars and to a lesser extent tasks and other information that stopped me using two organisers. Instead I have intensified my use of just the one organiser an A5. I'm still using the same A5 diary insert as I was back in 2013! 

Are you a 'single organiser person' or do you use more than one organiser in your day to day life?

8 comments:

  1. After LOTS of searching and trying things out I arrived at personal Cavendish that goes everywhere with me. It's versatile as its size means it can hold larger paper if I need more notes space. My system now is to make all the notes there and move them to storage in another personal binder as soon as they are not needed.I use bigger binders for work files and manuals but they usually need to be locked up due to confidentiality so I cannot carry them around. My Cavendish holds all day to day details for organising my work and home life.

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  2. I need to have everything in one place, both go in the same notebook in my Filofax Flex.

    I have a variety of Filofax Personal binders for reference material but the day to day is all in the Flex.

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  3. I have never used a second organisor because I also prefer having everything in one place.
    Otherwise I imagine not having the right organisor when needed ;-)

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  4. I have used multiple organisers in the past - not for different contexts (e.g. work/home) but for different parts of my organisational process (e.g. diary in one slim personal-sized folder, notes in another). It worked well for me and made taking what I needed (if I needed to take anything anywhere) a doddle. I do currently have most stuff which I might need to take with me if I leave the office in one organiser, but I would happily go back to multiple organisers if my needs changed.

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  5. This is very topical for me because I’m also thinking of consolidating into just one organiser. For the past three or four years I’ve been using a Lockwood/Nappa pocket slim (as featured on a post here on Philofaxy!) and an A5 (various!) at my desk. My eyesight is deteriorated a bit for reading and I’m thinking I should have something bigger than pocket, especially now I don’t need a wallet. Instinct tells me I should consolidate into A5, which has been my preferred size since the 1980s. However even an A5 Heritage binder is a big thing to carry around in my “man bag” or rucksack. The A5 Clipbook is lighter but not as classy. I may end up in my Heritage Compact as an every day carry and keep my Heritage A5 just for work. Personal is just not an ideal size to print pages for and I’ve enough A5 leaves to keep me going until I’m at least 100!

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  6. As much as I would love to have it all in one place, it's not possible. Work has to go in an A5 and it weighs a ton, so I can't be schlepping it all over town when I'm running errands. Personal is in a... personal, which is of course easily tossed into one's bag. Keeping two calendars is no big deal, because with no social life and no kids at home, and my health hasn't gone south on me yet, I very rarely have personal appointments that I need to write down.

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  7. Since changing over to a work from home job in November last year, I've been using an A5 for work & a personal for everything else. For a short while, I was using the A5 for both, but realised that it's better for me to separate the two, especially when I use the same desk & computer for everything.

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  8. I'm long retired. But when I was working and when I used a paper organizer (now called "planner")I bought my own rather than accepting the letter sized one work provided. It was in rings but I knew nothing of Filofax then. I kept everything in one book. I needed my personal calendar present at work because I would sometimes be called upon to work late or schedule on-call time.

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