Home-made WPP diary in pocket size

In an earlier post, I wrote about designing my own diary for the pocket filofax. Here’s a quick summary of it.

As I have said before, I don’t need much from a diary! I need the date range across the top of the page and I need space. I don’t need lots of information about holidays around the world, five different languages or the mini-calendar thing taking up real estate. I need all the days to get equal billing as I can be just as busy at the weekend as I am in the week.

So, armed with Open Office (because I know how to define the format of the result of the field entries in the word processed document using that programme and I haven’t worked that out in Word yet) and a source file for the dates, I produced my own minimalist version of a week per page (WPP) pocket diary.

When I say minimalist, I’m not kidding. I set my page size to pocket filofax paper size, + 5 mm all round (see sneaky trick below for why). I set my margins to 5 mm top and bottom and outside edge, 10 mm for the inside edge and margins mirrored. The actual diary part was extremely simple: basically a table of eight rows and one column, with the date range in the top cell and the days in the other seven.

My sneaky trick, because my printer whinges about small margins and it can be tricky to make them small enough to make the best use of the paper, is to set the page size of the file to 12.5 cm height (the filofax paper is 12 cm) and width 8.5 cm (rather than 8). Then it gets printed closer to the edge of the paper. I used filofax pocket paper (bizarrely, dated 1997 - I must have got it in a second-hand binder!) and manually duplex-printed.

Here’s the result: (click to enlarge)

Two weeks of WPP

Close up

I did say it was minimalist, didn’t I?
Let’s see if I can downsize into a 15 mm ring pocket by using it.