Sunday 30 January 2011

All change on the Filofax front!

You know your filofax needs a diet when you can’t actually turn the pages in it.

That was the problem I faced with my home filo a week or so ago. As well as being so full that the pages could barely move, it was heavy. I have never got on with a personal sized filofax. I wish I had – I would have been snapping up one of these beauties off the Filofax France site – the Baroque! In fact, some of me still wants to snap one up if I’m being honest, just in case I could persuade myself to downsize!

Anyway, because I have never got on with the personal size, I carry an A5 Finchley – not that it goes out and about too often, but it does have the occasional trip away from the desk. It’s my ‘work from home’ filofax, combined with lots of book reviews.

Until the crisis, it was arranged like this:
A year planner for seeing overall, big-picture deadlines, a month to a page, for medium-sized overviews, and a WO2P (horizontal – pinched from my A5 Domino) diary.
Following that was a set of cheap, coloured A5 dividers arranged like this:
Green – writing competition details (printed on home-designed sheets) and other writing deadlines/info; Blue – short story outlines and ideas; yellow – notes for novels; purple – blog ideas and notes and finally red – finance (some pages for writing and some for the charity I work for).
After that came 6 cream dividers (unlabelled) with, in order: stuff relating to the charity, blank notepaper; blank blog/ideas paper; personal goals sheets (A4 and Z-folded) along with other pages such as Christmas/present lists; a list of books to look out for and then at the back, a list of all the books I read in 2009 and 2011, and a set of reviews for all these books, filed in an A-Z, by author.

To even start to be able to use it, I had had to take out half the diary and two sets of A-Z (one containing addresses relating to home and writing and one to the charity). The personal addresses were rewritten and re-filed in an old personal filofax from the 90s, the writing ones and the charity ones were reprinted on different coloured paper (they are adapted contact pages) and filed either in behind the competition pages or in with all the other charity stuff.
But… it was still unusable. I could either remove all of the diary or remove all of the book reviews. If I removed all of the diary, I would have to carry another one and that was mad. So, all of the book reviews and lists have come out and are sitting, tied up with a ribbon, awaiting a new filofax!
The lovely bunch at Philofaxy persuaded me (it honestly didn’t take much) to get a jade Finchley from the French filofax site (see it here). When it arrives, the work domino will become a book-o-fax, the red Finchley will probably become my work filofax and the jade will become my new home filofax.

Now… do I get a personal Baroque ‘just in case’??

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