Organiser Routines

Our lives are made up of routines or workflows, I never know which is the right phrase, but I will use routines.

Our daily routines are either by design, you have worked them out, or they are just natural from early in our lives.

Think for a moment about the instant you wake up in the morning to the point you leave for work or school. A lot happens in that first hour or ninety minutes of the day. You wake up, get up, open the curtains/shutters, shower, get dressed, have breakfast and say goodbye to your partner before leaving etc.

So even your early morning routine can be different, some mornings you might have breakfast before you get showered and dressed. So nothing is fixed but somethings have to be done before other things.

Within your early morning routine there are other nested routines. Think for a moment about just getting dressed. Now obviously there are some things you have to do in a certain order! But I'm sure a lot of us dress in a similar order every day, right sock before left sock, when you put in your shirt or blouse your put your right arm in to the sleeve before the left arm in to the other sleeve?

So now turning to how you use your organiser to plan or organise your day or week. Do you have a routine that you work through so you don't miss out anything?

Again I've been subconsciously doing the same routine every week for at least the last year, possibly longer.

Each week might start empty and blank like this

But they quickly start to fill up with things to do each day.

At the beginning of the week, either late on a Sunday night or first thing on Monday morning. I set out my week and empty my thoughts on to the pages in my organiser.

I make sure I have all the appointments set out on the right days and at the right times. Some of these will have been entered before the start of the week, may be even weeks or months before when a particular trip was planned. But I have repeating appointments each week for Skype calls with friends that I don't enter in my organiser until the actual week, just in case one of my friends is away so we skip a week.

I do have to enter some of my appointments on to my electronic calendar, so that the rest of the family know what I'm doing. At the same time, I might add notes in my organiser to specific days if Alison is going to be away or has an appointment on a particular day, just in case she needs reminding.

Once I have got through the appointments for the week, I then focus on tasks for the week. I check the previous week for things that didn't get finished and transfer those to this week, if I still need to do them. I add any new tasks for the week to the appropriate section of my task list. If any of these tasks has a deadline on a specific day, I add a note to that day as well.

Now I could do my planning and organising in a different order, but I've got used to doing it in this order so I don't have to think about 'What do I do next?' and that to me is the key thing to all our daily routines. Working out the most efficient order to do things in for you will help you get more things done every day.

How do you organise your daily/weekly workflows or routines?

Getting organised...

I've been hearing voices in my head

'Help me..... Help me get organised'  

At first I thought it was something in the song I was listening to...

'I want to use my Filofax' 

That got my attention.  I lifted my headphones off of my ears... it was my dear wife Alison... no I wasn't hearing voices... she really wanted to use her Filofax to 'get organised'.

OK drama aside...

"Certainly dear... how can I help?"

So Alison as you know is a busy author these days. Her first book Inceptio was published back in March 2013, book two Perfiditas followed in October 2013.

Managing the launch and the follow up of one book was busy enough, but adding in the second book almost doubles the work load... and now Alison is in the preparation phase for book three due for publication later this year... oh and when she gets time she is writing book four and ideas for others too.... Who said retirement was boring!

So what prompted this sudden urge to dust off her 1980's Filofax? Alison is part of a big writing community much like the Philofaxy community in a lot of ways. Authors exchange ideas and tips much like we exchange tips and printables for our organisers.

Alison came across this post From ‘To do’ to ‘Done’ – confessions of an organised author by Roz Morris. Now Roz used a normal bound notebook for her different sections and pages. Alison and I have adapted the idea and used a Filofax for the different pages. I've even shared some of my abundant supply of dividers/pages to restock her Filofax.

The simple pages have been designed and printed off, it is very simple so it can be used across the different sections of the organiser. I printed it on Filofax plain pre-punched personal size paper.  The lines are very thin and a light grey to only supply a minimal impact on the page so if two lines of text are used for an entry the intermediate line doesn't disrupt the text too much.

The sections at the moment are divided in to:

• Books - Sort of a catch all for each book. 
• Promotion - Blog hops, articles for magazines, radio show appearances etc
• Blog site - Tweaks and changes to the format of the site and links to Amazon etc
• Research - For book plots, locations, continuity etc
• Events - Book signings, conferences 
• Blog posts - For her own blog and guest posts on other blogs

We have used a standard set of personal size dividers and relabelled them.

Alison has managed to clear her desk area of various scrappy bits of paper and sticky notes and transferred the details in to her new pages. Win win I think!

And if you want to find out about Alison's books, do visit her website Alison Morton's Roma Nova.

Are you organised?

People mistakenly think I'm a very organised person. This notion is very far from the truth. I often flit from one thing to another during any given day, sometimes because I need to, sometimes because I get distracted too easily by things around me or in front of me especially if I'm sat at my desk...

So I'm going to make a statement that might shock some of you...

Owning a Filofax organiser does not make you an organised person.

That has got that out of the way. So lets go back to basics shall we...

Why do we record things? Note I say record, not write, I will expand on that thought in a moment.... We record things to remind ourselves at a future date/time of things we are going to do. Or to record what we did and that we have done it.

For many years people have been trying to perfect this 'recording' and 'checking' activity, you would have thought by now we might have perfected it?

So why do various methods fail? Technology failing on us, exhausted batteries, cracked screens, devices lost or ones that have become obsolete. The pen that runs out as you are writing, the system that is too big to carry when needed, the list goes on.

One of the key things I've learnt over the years though is this especially when we are talking about a group of people maintaining a system is you have to make it easy for them to access the information as well as making it easy for them to keep it up to date.

You might have a wonderful pictorial presentation of what your group of engineers is going to be doing next week, but if it takes all week to create that 'picture', then it is not going to be easy to discover what they will be doing the week after and to keep things up to date every week. And I 'speak' from experience with this example!

Personally I find maintaining an electronic calendar easy when sat at my desk, with iCal open on my iMac, I point and click and type (touch typing helps!) and hit the return key and bingo I had the details of a flight I'm meeting on say the 28th December. That information is instantly shared on my wife Alison's computer and it will appear on my son's iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air all at the same time. Wonderful... except this... trying to do that operation on one of the mobile devices is a lot harder in comparison, unless I enter it using voice recognition software.

However, I like a lot of you much prefer to use pen and paper to record these things. So no more talk about technology and how wonderful it is.... or isn't...

So we have decided to use pen and paper... marvellous... now this is were this gets interesting... it's ok I'm not trying to lure you in to a trap like a salmon on to a hook...

So what size paper should we use? Oh that conundrum, A4 too big? Mini too small? Well we can't cheat physics, a sheet of paper has a finite size and we have to decide I suppose what size to use, unless we fold a bigger sheet to fit a smaller size, but with added bulk.

So do we need anything else? Oh a pen I suppose, Bic biro? Or a fancy fountain pen that they only made one of? Take what is comfortable for you to use and it fits your budget... let's go with the free promotional biro with 'Bloggs Window Cleaners' on it. It is a pen, it works, what more do we need..... We have paper and we have a means of writing on it.

With those two things you could devise a method and presentation of recording and noting things to do, meetings to attend, things to remember etc etc... and it would work. You might change it over time, you might refine the layout, but it would still work.

And then you would be organised. Yes?

So why have a few of us got a stock room full of organisers, diary inserts, spare rulers, address sheets in multiple languages, stickers, washi-tape etc?

Yes well, let us choose to ignore what is behind those closed doors for now... Just select one of those organisers for a moment and look at it in detail and see what it brings to the party shall we... We will worry about the rest of our holdings in the national organiser stationery mountain some other time.

A Filofax organiser, what does it do for our simple, but very effective paper and pen organiser?

Having just sheets of paper and a pen is fine if you never have to carry your 'organiser' with you anywhere. Apart from the wind coming in through an open window, your pages are going to sit there just fine in the layout you have chosen. You can pick them up and move them around in the day or during the week as much as you like. Carrying them to a meeting, or to another building might be a bit risky, you could accidentally lose a sheet on your way to the meeting, the pages might get a bit creased in your bag or coat pocket.

So your Filofax organiser holds these sheets of paper on its rings so that the sheets of paper are kept in the order you require, and within the boundary of the outer cover which affords them some protection from the elements and from being bounced around in your back pack.

Does it do anything else? OK may be it holds some other loose items, may be your pen as well.

So ok I will use a ring bound organiser it seems a good idea to keep things in the same place. But that does restrict you a bit on the size of the paper you use... You can't just change when you want without having more than one of these ring binders... sorry organisers.

At this point because we are going to have to fix the size of the organiser we are going to use for our 'organiser' it makes sense to try and decide which size you are going to use, but you don't have to go out and buy each size of organiser..... No you don't, trust me, you do not need to buy ones in every size...is that understood?

We will let you go out and buy some paper in each size, or just take some ordinary copier paper and cut it to the different sizes to try out your 'organiser' for real with your own handwriting to see if you can fit all of your notes and things in a typical day or week on to a page or two of your preferred size of paper.

Do that over a few days or weeks even and you will soon learn which is the best size for you.

Now at this point you might want to think about the time division of your 'organiser' we haven't gone decimal yet with time measurement, there are still 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week and a varying number of days in a month, so we tend to use days, weeks and months for most things.

We know from others that there are pros and cons about using a day layout or week layout. Which ever you decide to use will impact on the number of sheets of paper your 'organiser' will contain. This will influence the size of the rings your 'organiser' will have because again that thing called physics decides how much paper we can fit on to the rings of our Filofax organiser.

So given a reasonable amount of time we will settle on what we think is the ideal paper size, layout, pen to use, how many sheets we need to carry and therefore what size organiser with what ever size rings in it. Now you can buy an organiser in the size of your choice.

That is it then? No Steve, I can't decide which model; do I go for this one, which only costs £25, or that one for £300, what is the difference between them?

Nothing at all in terms of being organised.... nothing at all.......

Productivity Tips?

At the suggestion of one of our readers (Alison) I am going to try an experiment today. Alison asked the following question:

Anything on Time Management, Organisation.... Filofax related if possible. Do you have any links to productivity stuff you have found useful, a You Tube video on organising your desk, links to makers of complimentary products and so on.

I thought, after all our Filofax Organisers are only one of our tools to help us with our day to day organisation. So how does your Filofax link in to these themes and do you have any links to more specific Time Management/Organisation sites.

Add any links or tips in to the comments. We might run this as a regular feature depending on the reaction to this first post.

Thank you Alison for your suggestion.

To get you started here's a few posts I've come across recently:

• Being organised V.2 - My Little Rabbit

Untidy and Cluttered Life...

I am always trying to not hold on to clutter these days. For the last year or so we have been working our way through this house that we have lived in since 1986 de-cluttering cupboards and rooms. It's all part of our plan to move to our other house in France. In doing so I've come across things I had forgotten I still had, things I had given up looking for.

I've also got rid of a lot of things that were kept 'just in case' well 'just in case' never became 'I'm glad I kept that' or very rarely!

So over this last year or so I've always been looking out for hints and tips on trying to reform my hoarding habits and improve my efficiency when it comes to storing information and things that are needed in future. Storing them in such a way that I will be able to find them when I need them.

The same exercise has also applied to my Filofax, as I said a few weeks ago, I've slimmed down my A5 to reduce the bulk of this organiser. In doing so I now spend less time hunting through the pages/sections for things... so that was a winning idea. But I still go back through it to see if I can take out any more..

This evening I came across another blog called 'Unclutter' naturally I couldn't resist doing a search for Filofax or Planner on there and hey presto up popped some previous articles:

• Creating a central binder for your home - This looked like a great application for a Filofax
• Staying organised with binder clips - You could use this idea for keeping your spare pages and inserts organised and always to hand, may be on the inside of a cupboard door. 
• Weekly meal planner - there is a nice template at the end of this that you could easily use in your Filofax

That's just three that caught my eye, but there are lots lots more to browse through... trouble is my A5 is in danger of getting fat again !

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Forthcoming Emissions

I’ve returned from two-and-a-half weeks away from home, during which time I became so consumed with being productive that I lost track of my productivity tools. I basically stopped using Philo. I switched to a simple legal pad with a long list of tasks. Then even that fell into disuse, and I (dis)organized my time by reference to scattered post-it notes and scrawls in the margins of notebooks. Had I been there any longer, I would probably have hired someone to skywrite my to-do lists in the skies above Manhattan, because I could not possibly be bothered with any physical incarnations of such lists.

Now I back at my old desk, butt cheeks settled into their old imprints, and my Filofax at its old post to my right. I feel guilty about ignoring poor Philo. Then again, while I was ignoring Philo, I was also ignoring my poor pregnant wife, who will emit a child in the next 2 weeks or so. (Okay, I wasn’t ignoring her. But when you’re ridden with guilt and anxiety, like I am, anything short of constant, doting attention feels the same as ignoring.) And, of course, I’ve been ignoring Philofaxy. (Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.) I begin each day stocked to the gills with guilt. Now I'm overflowing.

So I must make amends in all areas of my life. I’m slowly reintegrating my Filofax into my life after its temporary banishment. I updated my “Financial” section to reflect recent inflows and outflows. I made a fresh to-do list. I updated my project page on shopping for a new lightweight stroller.

(Also, I'm not ignoring my wife any more.)

Perhaps this weekend, I will live the dream that has preoccupied me for months: I will buy new A-to-Z tabs and totally reorganize the whole damn thing. Once I do that, I will actually have something new and arguably useful to tell you all about.

That presumes, of course, that I don’t have a fricking baby on my lap this weekend.

What's Working

I had a hidden agenda in becoming a Philofaxy blogger...hidden from even myself. Accountability. Like many people who've made a transition from digital to analog, from one career or workstyle or lifestyle to another, or taken on any kind of shift that involves a change in organizational system, I'm guilty of endless tinkering and tweaking. As soon as I get all my information, notes, projects, schedules, and plans into one system, said system's flaws become immediately apparent -- and unbearable. So I tinker. I buy more Moleskines, index cards, or Circa refills, thinking I've finally found the answer to it all.

I must confess, no sooner had I posted this entry announcing that I had finally transcribed everything into my newly acquired 'faxes, that the itch returned. Once my desire to have everything in one place, on one (OK, two) interchangeable paper sizes was satisfied, all of a sudden it was all wrong. Now that I could carry everything I needed with me all the time, all of a sudden I didn't need or want to. It was cumbersome, burdening. And the perfect configuration -- personal A5, work A5, Pocket as PDA -- was suddenly all wrong. How well was my system working if I was I leaving the house with three -- count 'em, three -- 'faxes in my bag every day?

Could I abandon this blog and start over? Those new 18-month 'skine diaries look pretty darn cool. Or what about the minimalist route -- index cards, plain letter-size paper, and manila folders? But no. Accountability. I've finally and fully accomplished a solution that I thought I wanted. Give it time. Figure out what's working and not working. Maybe all I need to change is what's not working. Behind the Notes tab, I started keeping Filofax notes. A few pages later, it became clear that I was overpopulated by one Filofax. So I made the adjustment and kept going.

Now I'm noticing something cool. Instead of recopying information, I'm adding to it. For example, behind my Ideas tab, I have a page labeled Blog Ideas, containing some notes on blogs I admire, things I'd like to put on my own blog page, hosting ideas, and today, when I found out about something called Pro Blogger (a blog about making money with a blog), I simply added it to the existing page. An idea that might have gotten lost without being written down at all, or ended up many pages away from related information, is now right where I'll see it when I use it. And I can see my ideas develop over time.

Because I have a running book list for more than a year, I can clearly see which ones are going to be worth reading (Warlord, by Ilario Pantano) and which were just a fleeting notion (The Healing Diet, by Gerald Lemole, M.D.). In other words, my Filofaxes are helping develop my thought processes. Or at least, they're not distracting from them. Now that I'm detaching from tinkering, there's more time for the thoughts themselves.

Now for what's not working: That Filofax storage binder. The post spine doesn't let me easily read my archived notes. Does anyone know where I can get an A5 ring binder in the States or at least in North America? Anyone in the U.K. willing to ship me a few fairly inexpensive ones? (I'll include a few pounds over so you can have a pint or two on me.)

Mama's family, part deux

In the Comments section of the post "The 99-cent Solution," someone asked me how I keep 3 Filofaxes synched. The answer is, I don't. I'm copying my comment in response here, to bring it out to the front, in case anyone else had the same question (thank you, Blogger):

"I have separate A5 binders for personal (red) and work (black), with no crossover. If I end up taking personal notes at work or work notes at home, I just make sure to use a clean page, so "synching" is just moving one piece of paper.

When I write in the pocket filo, I use the paper like index cards, one issue per page, so I can pop that into a big book if I want to. That book mostly holds my personal calendar, shopping lists, and most-used addys and numbers.

Since the pocket filo is always with me, and I have a pretty good memory, I find I haven't been keeping the calendars synched. My current challenge is to figure out how to handle this. There's no real reason to copy appointments into the red A5 personal filo, although that book contains everything else...to-do lists, project notes, ideas, lists, plans.

The big work A5 with the daily pages was supposed to be this wonderful work record where I record my accomplishments by the hour. But I haven't been doing that. Whether or not my work gets done is documented automatically in other ways, without my having to do any extra writing. I'm allergic to redundancy, so I resist the extra documentation. And frankly, I don't like to see my wasted time documented in black and white!

Furthermore, when I'm at the office, I mark all appointments in iCal and have that calendar open on my screen all day. Usually, I find out about deadlines and meetings via email, so it's hard to resist just keying them into the computer calendar.

Currently, I'm tinkering with combining my personal and work A5's. It would strain the rings on my beloved red Belgravia, but it would free up the black A5 to fill a current void -- a kitchen counter book with me/hubby/household calendar with emergency numbers, appliance information, messages to each other, etc. Well, not exactly a void...there's a sloppy letter-size binder from Kinko's (sort of) doing that now, but I'd love to get that into the A5 paper size. I'm definitely NOT allergic to interchangeability!

P.S. After writing this post, I started using the daily pages in the work A5 again. This blog is proving to be good motivation for me after all!