Guest post series - 'Filohax' No.2 - Paul

Thanks again to Paul for this second instalment in his guest post series. If you missed the first one, you can find it at Guest post series - 'Filohax' No.1 - Paul.

Another idea came from looking at my own Filofax usage - my appointments diary was primarily filled with work activities, so the equal day space given to 'Saturday' and 'Sunday' was just wasted space. I needed a week on one page that relegated the weekend to just a few lines so as to maximise Mon-Fri.

DIY calendar
With these new insights in mind, and a suggestion from Steve Morton about sketching out your own ideal layouts, I resisted the urge to splash out on a paid for diary and started using my own handmade diary inserts.

Hand made wo2p

 

So why not design exactly what I wanted? That's when I realised I could reintroduce the original Filofax typeface 'Elephant', I just needed to dust off my Staedtler 0.1 pen to draw the typeface in the size and positions I want.

Hand drawn work in progress diary

 

My old graphic design sensibilities came to the fore, and a desire to revisit the old Filofax typeface turned into a functional yet decorative idea to show a weekly count down to my next holiday; in the form of a super large number ghosted back in the lower right hand corner of the spread. 

My main takeaways from this research were to restrict the time-wasting act of copying slavishly daily repeating to do items over from one day to the next by writing them out onto a narrow card, divided to match up to the horizontal layout of days and hole punched and slit - and simply pulling this out of the rings onto the new weeks pages. I tweaked this innovation further by deciding to use one side for work to-dos, the other for personal.

Recurring 'work' to-do card

Recurring 'personal' to-do card

Another layout innovation came as soon as I realised that the page marker/recurring to-dos card seemed to mask off half of each page it folded on to - guiding me naturally to a split 50% business 50% personal vertical page split. 

Calendar paper
I'm currently enjoying the creative act of drawing up my own week on two pages, and a side benefit has been finding that the specialist graphic design Goldline layout paper pad I've been using is very light yet resistant to 'bleed' - at only 50gms it's bordering on being tracing paper (a useful property back in the days before Apple Mac, when Designers needed to create 'layouts' by tracing reference material through the thin layout sheets to make mock-ups of ads/brochures/logos etc.)

However, if I ever tire of doing this I will have a very detailed brief to get made into printables. 

Colour schemes
Oh, and as I was determined to strip the cacophony of colours back to black and one highlighter colour ( my days as a Designer meant that 'there is always a way', you just have to trust that you will find it). This settled down to using a muted yellow for 'work' activities and lavender for 'personal' activities. And to further restrict any assault on the retina, I decided to only use colour to draw attention to a previous day's uncompleted task or appointment by a blob of colour in the offending bullet circle.

The bullet journal approach introduced (to me) a revolution in managing the outcomes of appointments - by using the bullet icons, I had to forward plan outcomes and created a spreadsheet to log 'contractor visits', turning a vague list of meeting notes into actionable lists. 

'Contractor visits' section

 

Quick navigation
I would like to say that I diligently researched planners and planning before getting back into using my Filofax, but in reality I just became obsessed with looking at the amazing variety of what has been going on over the last 20 odd years of my absence! One innovation that caught my attention came from the travel journal community in the form of monkey fist page markers.

Without divider tabs, journal users need a way to quickly navigate to commonly used pages and having these hanging out of the bottom of the journal makes it super quick to do so. And they look great too! So in the spirit of 'try before you buy' I fashioned my own - in the form of a leather shoe lace! Tied around the top ring it is then laid through the section you want to navigate to. I had a particularly long lace so just doubled it to make two markers, and aiding quick navigation between them by simply leaving more lace sticking out of one of them. 

Leather laces

Tabbed dividers
You might say "but this is what tabbed dividers are for" and you would be right, however these come at a high price in the form of lost ring space (especially with the really thick plastic ones) and I've found that the trade off of thin dividers for lesser used sections and using 'monkey fist markers' for the high footfall pages such as calendar and inbox is a good one - for me.

On the subject of section dividers, my solution was to keep the work sections dividers simple black with relatively thin paper, but with the tab made out of Dymo labels back to back giving quite a sturdy tab. I also liked the 'utilitarian aesthetic' of Dymo and its larger bolder font is good for my ageing eyesight! One decorative feature I did add was to hole punch the dividers with a repeating pattern of holes as a design homage to our beloved 6 rings. I also like to think that I'm saving on weight too! 

 

 

 

Sub sections
Another choice I made was to use sub sections within each major tabbed section, but to label these using bought labels from 'Post-it' company. They stick to the page, which keeps the thickness down, but can be repositioned as you take pages out. For ease of navigation, I line each major sections sub sections tabs up directly underneath the major sections tab. 

 

More on 'Creativity and Decoration' in my next post.