Jade Finchley Goes to Work

This will be the first of a series of blogs about how I have set up my filofax(es). After some great posts over on Philofaxy about using your filofax for time-management, I thought I would share how my work filofax is set up as this is the most managed area of my time…

Not that long ago, I only had a work filofax. It was a red A5 domino. Then I fell in love with a red A5 Finchley and used it at home. Then I had a mad splurge (see here…) and overnight, I had 5 filofaxes.

So, all change on the filofax front… The red A5 domino became a book-o-fax (which will be the next in the series to be featured), the red Finchley stayed as the home one, the new jade A5 Finchley became the work filofax, the pink mini baroque became my purse (see here for details of it), and finally, the pink personal baroque is still in its box awaiting a use (but it was so glorious, and to be discontinued, and I just had to have it…).

Of course, now I have gone ahead and bought the Gourmet Gift Filofax, but honest to goodness, it was for the Gourmet card (though DH is not convinced and laughed his head off when I said the card came with a free filofax!).

But I digress…

Here is the arrival of the jade Finchley (which came in a box not a slip cover, from Filofax France. The box is being put to use holding spare pages and so on).

I changed my set-up last week (bad move… it was a really busy week and I couldn’t find a thing in my filofax. I should have waited until a quiet week came by). The front page lists what/where. In essence I am blending the ‘Four Bucket’ approach (see links list below), with the principle that there should be one input area (where I have blank notepaper as a ‘landing pad’). Okay, I also have a blank meetings planner section, but that mostly reflects how many meetings I end up in!

Here is the Jade Finchley, all set up for work.

Front page of the Finchley so I can find things!

So, the four buckets: one – the monthly calendar. I use a vertical WO2P, with a hack to show where months start (um, nothing more technical than some folded over sticky labels with the months written on them and stuck as close to the start of the month as I can get). I took a close-up picture:

Find-the-month hack

Incidentally, my diary is half-way through my filofax to make it easier to write on both halves of the week. It’s the one area that gets written in many times a day.

The second bucket is a catch-all bucket or To Do list – right at the front so it’s easy to find. I keep completed To Do lists in the filofax too, mostly to see what I’ve done, but also to point out to my boss what I’ve done!

The third bucket is a daily bucket which I have to say is delegated to some scrap paper, roughly A6 in size, punched with 3 holes and with my daily to do written on it and inserted into the diary in the right place. It’s scrap paper because I throw them away at the end of the day so don’t want to shell out on expensive paper, and also I have stacks of these slips of paper (left over from another use at work).

The 'daily bucket' is the scrap of paper on the RHS

The fourth bucket is the memory bucket or information storage place. I have categorised it further and filed the notes for it behind some cheap A5 dividers from a stationery store, re-punched to fit the filofax.

So, that’s the set-up. Now that I’ve got used to it it’s working okay.

If you are interested in time-management, you could do worse than check out these:

Time-management Ninja: http://timemanagementninja.com/

The Four Buckets article is at: http://daytimer.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/the-four-buckets-for-maximizing-your-time/

How do others use their filofaxes for work?