06 January 2023

Free For All Friday No 739 by Laurie

It's the first FFAF of the new year! Wishing you all a wonderful 2023.

Recently I was looking through some of the old Philofaxy posts that Anita linked in some of her FFAFs. I especially love reading older posts and all of the comments. I did lots of commenting before I was a regular contributor here on Philofaxy. While reading some of my comments, I discovered I have been struggling with some of the same planning issues almost continuously for more than ten years!

One issue I noticed in comments by myself and other readers is this: I need to see a week view for planning, but I need much more space than is available in a week view for daily writing space. Apparently this is a common problem.

In the past I tried several remedies. For a long time, I reasoned that a larger page size would solve my problem, so I moved out of my Filofax into a large (and sometimes very large, A4) bound planner for more daily writing space.

Even in a week-to-view planner with huge pages, I often found the daily spaces were not big enough for my daily schedule, lists, and notes I wanted to take about the day.

I moved back to my A5 Filofax with vertical weekly pages for planning, and used separate daily pages for more daily space. For awhile I tried dated daily pages but also found those too constraining, so I switched to plain, blank pages. 

So for the past year or so I've been doing all my planning in my weekly pages, then plan and record today in my blank pages. I have noticed, and other people in a similar situation have commented on old Philofaxy posts, that this causes me to re-write each day on a new page, then fill in the page(s). (Often I use more than one blank page to record each day.)

It's a little inconvenient, and I wonder if there is a more streamlined way to plan. For me, after all the things I have tried, I find a little re-writing is worth it for a system that otherwise is working well for me.

Do you, like me, need to see a weekly view for planning but need more space for daily recording? What have you tried?

And as always on Fridays, feel free to ask and/ or discuss anything ring binder organiser related!


4 comments:

  1. It’s not a problem I usually face these days since I’m medically housebound, but I do think if you need that week/day visibility and space you simply can’t beat DIYFish inserts. Month, week and day all visible at once, with plenty of space for notes, tracking and to dos. Whilst I prefer some of her older styles to newer ones, especially of the weekly chart, I don’t think you can beat the sheer flexibility of her system.

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  2. Could you print your week on the left hand side of an A4 page, then have that fold out and use regular A5 pages for your dailies? Does that make sense? It's kind of hard to describe without some visual aids.

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  3. Hi, it is Sundya, so forgive me for taking advantage of free for all Friday on a Sunday - I wondered if anyone knew anything about two Filofaxes I own. They are personal size, Domino style, rubbery exterior, with printing on the front to appear like an exercise book, they have the Filofax 'F' on the spine, and the inserts include Filofax branded timetables and alternating green and blue Filofax branded dividers, the front page has 'back to School' on it. I bought them a long time ago from a store in Australia specialising in Filofax, that was refreshing its stock and selling things off at a cheap price. I have not been able to see online anything about this model before

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    Replies
    1. They sound like these “Back to School” ones from 2013:
      https://philofaxy.blogspot.com/2013/03/filofax-2013-new-range.html

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