Free For All Friday - No. 851 by Anita

Whilst doing some decluttering the other week, I came across some very old notes from when I used to have a yearly work appraisal. I'd joined a newly created team at the time, so our wonderful supervisor was trying out the Stop, Start, Continue feedback method to help us improve how we worked together. As we were dealing with both a new project and a new team, I definitely felt that the method helped us with implementing the work and also getting to know each other. 

Until I came across those notes, unsurprisingly it's not something I've thought about for a long time, but it occurred to me that I could use stop, start and continue lists in my Filofax to help me identify what is working, and what could be improved or changed. The more I think about it, I think they could be very helpful to me in lots of different ways:

• At the beginning of a year, instead of New Years resolutions. 
• Updated and/or reviewed on a monthly basis - I've found over time that a monthly review works best for me.  
  
• To help with a specific project or area of life.
• On an adhoc basis, if I'm feeling overwhelmed and want to make a quick decision about what to focus on.   

Have you tried something like this before in your planner, and if so, has it worked for you?

And as always on Fridays, please feel free to discuss anything organiser related. I hope that you have a great weekend.

The Move to France

As mentioned in FFAF no. 75, I have just moved to France. This has been a long term plan of my wife and I, so it wasn't a sudden thing. I've effectively retired from full time work as well (More time for Philofaxy!).

As this was our first house move in 24 years, you can imagine it was a fairly major move. The date of our move wasn't finalised until about 4 weeks before the actual move due to being linked to the sale of our UK house.

I sort the advice of Laurie, who is a frequent mover between countries... which sounds bad I know!!! But her tips proved very useful and included things I had not thought of.

Naturally, my Filofax proved to be very useful in the move, both for the organisation of various lists and for noting down important data. I'm a big user of To-Do lists anyway, so their use didn't surprise me at all.

One thing that happened almost by accident was I started to use coloured notepaper (because I had some already) for noting down information for different things, using the different colours to signify different functions and requirements. So utilities went on to green paper, financial on to blue paper etc. It separated out the different sections in that part of my Filofax without having to use tabbed section dividers. Having used this technique I will certainly use it again.

Having had a couple of days to recover from our last day of packing and the journey over to France I've just sat down and rationalised the contents of my two 'working' Filofax organisers.

In my Slimline I took out the completed To-Do lists that I'd been slavishly using, and the notepaper information and filed them carefully. As I use the Slimline as my wallet, various cards have been removed... likewise my UK money... I've asked for some pocket money in Euro's from my dear wife. Is it pay day yet was her reply!!!

Similarly in my A5 organiser, I've been updating my To-Do lists and started off some new ones of things we have to do now we are here... so the process never finishes, it just moves on to a new phase.

Thank you also for all your best wishes, very kind of you.

The solution to the small Filofax calendar pages??

A recurring issue we Filofax users have is the page size/ book size ratio. In order to have calendar/ diary pages large enough to write everything we need, the resulting book can be big and sometimes unwieldy. So we try to strike a balance between a small enough book/ big enough page. But often the daily spaces in the weekly planners are still just too small to write everything we need to each day.

But today I read an interesting article that could possibly be the solution. I subscribe to Travisthetrout's blog (http://travisthetrout.wordpress.com/) and yesterday's post has a list of interesting links from this week. One of those articles is "Calendar Or To-Do List? Two Task Management Tools Compared."

Now listen. I've been reading a lot lately about to-do lists. Let me say, some people write about lists like they invented the list. I mean, come on. List-writing is probably the earliest form of human organization in the world. People were using sticks to write inventory lists in cuneiform on mud tablets thousands of years ago. So don't pretend you're being revolutionary about a list.

But this article really is, wow. Especially toward the end of the article, something clicked. Basic premise is, don't schedule your tasks. Huh? Leave white space on your calendar. Um... what?

"Calendar or To Do List?" is about keeping white space on your calendar to effectively gauge your availability for completing your tasks. You write your tasks someplace else OTHER than your calendar. I've been doing the opposite: artificially scheduling tasks in order to have them in front of me at all times.

Andre Kibbe, author of the above-mentioned article, says that's all well and good for those tasks that actually have to be accomplished at that time on that particular day. But for general tasks not tied to a time or day, keep them OFF your calendar, for crying out loud!

I have to admit while I was reading this article and got to the heading When to Use Calendars, I had to roll my eyes. Oh man. Doesn't everybody know when to use a calendar? Actually, no. I didn't.

His message really started to hit home when he mentioned all those little tasks that tend to fill up my day "will be greater in number than what can be crammed into a typical calendar blank." No WONDER my daily spaces are so packed, yet I still feel scattered!

I won't re-write the article here, but go read it if you have time because it could be very useful for those of us struggling with Filofax's small daily spaces.

There's also a link to another article of his about context lists, which is particularly useful for Filofaxers too because we can have as many context lists as we want in our Lists section (or wherever you like to put your lists).

So, thank you to Travisthetrout for pointing it out, and especially to Andre Kibbe for writing this article that really got me thinking in the opposite direction!

Could this be the answer to the age-old Filofax dilemma? Is this the solution to the too-small daily spaces? What do you think?

A List of Lists

Remember the Book of Lists? I have very specific recollections from my childhood relating to the book of lists. One of my Mom's best friends was a boisterously gay man, Darrell, who babysat me occasionally. (I mention that he was gay because, in mid-1970s Kansas City, homosexuality was not exactly sung from the rooftops. It took a while for my child-mind to grasp his status. Of course, the beauty of the child-mind is that it seemed inconsequential to me -- different, but inconsequential.) He lived alone in a sparse apartment. When I spent the evening there, he would entertain me with hilarious impressions and stories. Darrell also had a copy of the Book of Lists, and after laughing ourselves silly, I would relax in a chair and pore over the lists. I was, perhaps, six or seven years old at the time, but I already had a fascination with categorization, organization, and comprehensive accounts of facts.

That fascination never went away. My Filofax now functions as my personalized Book of Lists. Here is a list of the some of the lists in my Filofax:

• Window installers. We need new windows.

• A list of the courses my wife and I had at our extravagant anniversary dinner a few weeks ago. (It took place here. The dinner was so clearly the most amazing dining experience I've ever had that, the next morning, after the wine-and-food haze had subsided, I had to record every morsel we tried.

• Local sources for Filofax supplies.

• Ideas for this blog. (And this idea isn't even on it!)

• Restaurants I want to try, subdivided into "big deal" restaurants and regular old restaurants. There will soon be another subset, for "Restaurants to suggest for my wife's birthday," which is on January 9th.

• List of compact digital cameras that may be suitable replacements for my old one.

• A list of the names of all the people I have to buy Christmas presents for, with space to indicate what present has been purchased. There are 20 names on the list so far, and nothing purchased.

All of the above lists are in my "Notes" section. I, of course, have a separate set of To-Do lists. Perhaps someday I will regale you with them as well. In the meantime, please contemplate the above.

(And, it turns out, the Book of Lists is still around -- there's even a "New" Book of Lists, which is confusingly labeled as the "original." So you don't need to make your own lists, if you don't want to. They come pre-made.)