Ah, here we go again... Pocket? Personal?

I know. I’ve been here before. I hum and haw about this for a while, decide ‘yes, I can make it work in a pocket’ then I move over, lock, stock and barrel. And then about a month later I move back into a personal.

I’ve done the scoping exercises. I know exactly what I need in a planner. It’s exactly what a personal sized Baroque looks like. End of.

Except... Except... Except...

I have a drawer full of pocket filofaxes (and a Mulberry or two) looking doe-eyed and appealing. And small.

Oh, and there’s the rub.

There is no getting away from the fact that my Baroque feels huge sometimes. It’s not just a planner, it’s a wallet too so needs to have space for cards and money and receipts and vouchers and all that guff. And since I seem utterly incapable of working out that a monthly sheet would save having to have an entire year of week-to-view diary in the binder weighing it down and taking up ring-space, I have an entire year of week-to-view diary in there, weighing it down and taking up ring space.

I would LOVE to move into the pretty little red Portland (15mm rings... 4mm too small). But to do so would probably mean carrying a wallet as well as the filofax and that then defeats the point of carrying something small... There would also be the very strong probability that I would leave either filofax or wallet behind when leaving the house and then find I needed them.

I have made a pocket work for me before – I’ve had months in both an Aston and in a pocket Baroque (well, months if you combine the time in each of them) but it always feels a bit of a struggle in comparison with using the personal. If I could somehow convert that bit of my brain that struggles with being able to use a monthly planer I could probably drastically reduce the pages carried in it and really work the weekly reviews (take out the past week of week-to-view and replace with one more so there is constantly a month’s worth in there, plus the monthly planners). It’s always how to carry the cards that gets to me though. I carry bank and credit cards, but then there are all those other cards that no, I don’t use on a weekly or possibly even monthly basis, but if I don’t have them with me I will either lose them completely or find I need them and don’t have them with me. So I carry all of them and that takes up ring space since the card carriers for the pocket size only have 4 slots and are arranged in a way to make the binder really bulky since the cards overlap so much.

Does anyone use a pocket-size as both a well-functioning wallet and a well-functioning planner? Do you also blog? If so, please, please link to a blog-post showing how you get it to work? If you don’t blog – fancy doing a guest post on here to show how you make it all work? If you do blog, would you fancy doing a guest-post on here...?

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