Free For All Friday No. 119

Now that it's March it feels like spring is on its way here in Scotland, with flowers coming up and leaves budding out. Is it feeling like springtime yet where you are?

Are you making any plans in your Filofax for spring cleaning, trips for spring break, or other seasonal preparations?

And as always on Fridays, feel free to post comments about anything Filofax-related! :)

Happy Friday everyone!

Guest Post - Filofax Best Friend - @mrs_eddieizzard

I will make no apologies as I can see I’m amongst friends. I am a stationary geek. People are always shocked to hear that I love all things stationary and that a nice notebook or a new pen will make me squeal with delight. I’m lucky to have a friend who shares my obsession and will accompany me to visits to Staples and upon a recent trip to Paris she made her family find a stationary shop in order to bring me home 3 different types of notebooks! It’s via her that I discovered what I consider to be the cherry on the top of my filofax.

It’s a pencil case that clips onto the filofax and with elastic straps it will fit an A5 to A4 filofax. It’s wonderful and really does finalise my filofax into being the best thing in the world excluding (but only just) my children! It’s from Staples and is in their “binder gear” range; it was less than £10 and was hanging on a point of sale display on the ring binder isle. Despite it not being available to buy on line it is well worth a trip to your local store to pick one up.

Disclaimer – I have not been given this item to “review” (i.e. bribed by free products into saying good things about it), I feel really strongly about this in the blogging / twitter world and would not do it. This recommendation is genuine and I have received no kick backs for doing so. @mrs_eddieizzard

Thank you @mrs_eddieizzard for your great guest post, I think that case is a great addition to an A5 Filofax and a very neat solution. 

Mid Week Webfinds

Once again we go off in search of other peoples mutterings and pictures of their Filofax organisers.

• Size? - Filomaniac
• My Songbird - My Beauty Bible
• The Downsizing Experiment continues - LoulouDorset
• Listography - Miss Kirsty's Blog

Enjoy....

Task Management With Your Filofax

Continuing our discussion series on how to 'Get Things Done' using your Filofax, I think it's time I was a little bit more open and disclose a bit about my own methods, or rather the lack of them !!

You see whilst I don't work in the same sense that most people do, I'm just an assistant to 'The Boss' I still I suppose have to 'Get Things Done' otherwise nothing would get done, but my 'tasks' might be a bit more mundane than most... we aren't talking 'Blue Sky Thinking' here.

It's stuff like doing the ironing before we run out of shirts and blouses to wear. Making sure I remember all those small things I intend to purchase that we can't get easily in France on our next visit to UK. Or stuff I would like to get done some day but there's no particular deadline, but if I don't note it down somewhere the xyz component I need to order to accomplish the task will get forgotten about.  OK I'm sure I'm not alone with this sort of every day stuff.

So here's the confession... Up to now it's all been a little haphazard, sure it's written down somewhere I'm sure but in a variety of lists and bits of paper. How anything has gotten done is a minor miracle I suppose.

However, since I started using just my Slimline Finsbury for my To-Do lists a few weeks ago, I certainly have felt more 'focused' in being able to get a grip with my various tasks and projects. But it was far from perfect, because all I had done was transferred my pages across from other organisers. So how can I improve on this...

Looking at a few different on-line sources including some electronic task managers... which I've tried and never really got on with! They seemed to have a common approach. So this week I'm going to try a new approach with my To-Do lists.

I have separated my tasks in to:

• This Week
• This Month
• And sometime in the future
• Projects 
• Blog Posts

This isn't a standard set up, because I know most people advocate having a 'Today' list as well. In my case that is not critical. Also there's nothing particularly radical or new in this idea, but by paying attention to your comments and other peoples suggestions I think this might work for me.

Although I've only been using this set of To-Do lists for a couple of days, already I feel more focused and I feel able to remember to do more things and get more things done. I just wish now I had made this change sooner!

Can you think of any improvements I might implement?

Free For All Tuesday No 4

So what questions do you have for us this week?