Current set-up: diary, to do/notes, and Travellers Notebook

I haven't blogged on here for a while (I've been busy writing and editing my novels, as well as writing for Nero's Notes), but I did tell you about my 2019 diary a while back, so I thought, since we're now in the second quarter of 2019, I should update you on how it's going.

I'm pretty much using the same system that I've used in the past, but with a couple of tweaks. I have my main diary/planner, which lives on my desk and never goes anywhere else, I have a running list of 'stuff to do/remember' and I have my Every Day Carry that is usually in my handbag as it's predominantly a wallet.

Main Diary:

This is still the Box Clever Press one I blogged about. This has honestly been one of the best diaries I have ever used! I'm even using the month at a glance pages (and we all know how terrible I am at knowing what they're for!).

So, why is it so good?

Circling back almost to where I started...

Life is about to change enormously for me as I leave work purgatory in a week. I'm wondering what system will work well for me once I am pretty much in charge of my time. In trying to help me to decide, I thought I would run through what I've used over the years and what has or hasn't worked for me.
Basically, I have chopped and changed almost as many times as I've had hot dinners, and wasted huge amounts of money on trying to find the 'right binder' (when I was probably hunting for the right system), but a few things have become apparent: I like week+notes and a DPP. Pocket doesn't work for me, however cute the binders are. And I'm rubbish at turning the page so in fact, I don't need to carry both W+notes and DPP around with me; just the W+notes will do!

How did I get to this point of realisation? Read on (if you're suffering from insomnia) and I'll take you through the disasters of the years!

In the beginning (a.k.a. 2011)
January: I used an A5 at work and an A5 at home and was struggling to get my head around using a personal for my day to day carry around. I was also debating whether or not to buy a personal size filofax! Scoot forward to April 2011 and I was faffing over A5 or Personal and wrote this post about what I needed in a carry-around. It's really interesting (at least to me) that what I needed then is exactly what I need now! Even then I found it nigh on impossible to turn a page to see what I was supposed to be doing and liked the thought of a week plus notes. Plus ça change and all that.

By the end of April 2011, I had moved wholeheartedly into the pink Baroque and was loving it. It functioned as my wallet as well as a planner and I loved it. I then bought a turquoise Baroque. And then a green Portland.

It's now beginning to get embarrassing reading over these old posts as, in August 2011 I was pondering personal or pocket and deciding to stick with personal (see the post here) but by the end of August 2011 I had bought my first (of many!) pocket filofaxes - a pocket Cavendish (see here for the post saying I'd bought it and here for more details on the binder). However, I stayed in the personal size (and the pocket went into the drawer of my desk and tried to have a party on its own) and even bought a Cavendish (see here and here for details).

2012
2012 was a year of faffing about, BIG TIME! Though I do note that I realised even then, that a month to view did not work for me!
February: I was wondering about moving into pocket size (see here); I bought the pocket Aston (see here) and moved in (see here).
April: I'd bought a personal Holborn (see here) and was wondering if I had planner fail (see here).
May: I was still in the pocket Aston and had shifted to week + notes for the diary (see here)
By June, I was in the personal Holborn; by July I had bought two A5 Mulberry binders (admittedly not as carry-arounds!); by August I'm on about the current carry about being the pink Baroque again, but had bought a Mulberry A6 and a pocket Baroque... In September, I moved into the A6 Mulberry (Indie). My old foe, the desire for colour had struck again by December and I was out of Indie and had bought a scarlet Mulberry AND a wine Holborn.
So, in 2012 I had used: personal, pocket, personal, A6. Would 2013 be any more stable?

No.

2013
I bought:
January - Green pocket Mulberry (Loki)
April - pocket Classic in red (see here)
August - pocket Portland in red (see here)
September - personal Portland in blue (see here)
December - another A5 Mulberry (see here)

System-wise, I was all over the place!
January - A6 Mulberry (Red)
April - pocket Baroque
May - personal Holborn (wine); August - personal Baroque
Most of the rest of the year I was havering over personal or A6.

2014
I think my favourite post of all time summed it up>>>> Siren songs
Despite those siren songs, I spent the whole year using personal size paper. Admittedly there was still some binder chopping and changing: turquoise Baroque to wine Holborn to navy Portland and then to slimlines - the red de Villiers (my most successful binder ever!) and then compact Cavendish.

2015
Well, we're not done with it yet, but I've changed system dramatically once already!
I started the year still in a compact. My beloved red de Villiers was beginning to get worn, so I moved into the wine Holborn (briefly), tried the compact Cavendish and then I tried a compact Belgravia (see here for a compare/contrast between Cavendish and Belgravia). Mid April saw a red Traveller's Journal by The Stamford Notebook Company arrive but although I loved it, I didn't move in. Instead I bought a compact Holborn (see here) and then a slimline Adelphi (see here). Despite that ticking ALL the boxes, I still shifted into the TJ, partly because it was new and partly because I needed the page size.

So here we are, several years down the line and more binders than I want to think about, and I find I am back with a week+notes in almost A5 size and a DPP in my reporter's notebook. I realise that I need a colour pop (so no more black binders!) and I need cards and money to be catered for. Whether that's in the scarlet Adelphi or the Stamford Traveller's Journal in 2016 is yet to be decided. Let's see how the last quarter of 2015 goes, once I have left hell.

Thank you, everyone who has been on this journey with me!

Pocket Holborn...?

Oh, Shadow Wolf has gone and done it now...! Between her saying how fabulous her pocket Holborn is, me having looked and looked and looked at the pocket Holborn over time and eBay having a new one for a good price right now... enabling!!

So, in an attempt at sane rationality, I’m going to compare and contrast the Baroque and the Holborn. Hopefully, I will find that the Holborn is no better than the Baroque I already have and so there is no point buying it.
[This is also known as the null-hypothesis and we all know that that’s actually what you’re trying to disprove!]

Shadow Wolf assures me of flattability, so we needn’t compare on those grounds, which leaves pockets, rings and colour.

Pockets:
a) Baroque
There are four card slots plus a curved pocket that can be used for cards.
There is a full-height pocket behind the card-slots, then a zipped pocket, then another full-height pocket behind the zipped one and another full-height pocket behind that.
In the back there is a note-pad pocket.
There is no full-width pocket along the back.

b) Holborn
There are three card-slots and a curved pocket that can be used for cards.
There is an outward-facing full-height pocket behind the card-slots. There is also an inward-facing full-height pocket behind the card-slots.
In the back cover, there is an outward-facing full-height pocket (and I think there is a zipped pocket inside here - Shadow Wolf can you confirm or deny?). There is also an inward facing full-height pocket.
There is a full-width pocket along the back.

Rings:
a) Baroque
19mm

b) Holborn
15mm

Colour:
The Baroque I have is black. If I had a turquoise or pink one, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion! The black is okay – redeemed by the embossing inside, but nonetheless, black.
The Holborn on eBay is wine. The wine-red personal Holborn I have is a gorgeous colour. I could certainly live with it in pocket size.

The crunch is the pocket layout I think. If I work through what I would put where, maybe that would help?

a) Baroque
In the past I have had 4 cards in the card-slots, stamps in the pocket behind, other cards in the zipped pocket, in the full-height pocket behind the zipped one I put vouchers and the other full-height pocket was too tricky to get things in and out of so I didn’t use it. In the notepad pocket in the back I put paper money. Coins went into a zip-loc bag at the back and there was one card-holder on the rings.

b) Holborn
Since I have never held one, I will have to predict how I would use the pockets...
4 cards in the card slots. Other cards in the zipped pocket at the back. Stamps in one of the full-height pockets (probably the front inward-facing one as there is never a rush to get to them!). Vouchers in one of the other full-height ones (probably front outward-facing for easy access).
Paper money and receipts would go in the full-width pocket along the back; coins would go in the zip-loc bag.
Now, this leaves me an inward-facing pocket and an outward-facing pocket still to assign things to! I have a pocket-size address book which I got with the Flex which I could probably slot into the inward-facing pocket at the back, which might (might) free up the rings so that 15mm ones would be okay. The other 15mm ring versions of filofaxes always fail because I have to carry the cards on card-holders on the rings which leaves no space for paper contents.

Hmm... Shadow Wolf – if you’re reading this, will the Holborn work how I think it would??? Because if so, I may just succumb!

Pockets, pockets, pockets

Well, I gave myself a stern talking to after the last yearning and convinced myself that I should stay in a personal size and that if I really, really needed a change of scenery with it, I should move into the pink one or into a Holborn.
But the pocket “itch” is still there! The thing is, I think I know what the ideal pocket layout would be and I don’t think it exists in any binder.
I want:

• At least 4, easy-to-get-things-in-and-out-of card slots
• At least one other pocket for things like stamps
• A zipped pocket (for the other cards that don’t sit in a card-holder or in the card slots)
• Flat-as-a-bat floppiness
• 19mm rings
• A back pocket that runs across the full width of the binder to put paper money in

Other pockets would be good as long as I can get things in and out of them reasonably easily.

So how do my current stash of pocket-sized binders fare?

Model	No. card-slots?	Other pocket(s)?	Zipped pocket?	Flat-as-a-bat?	19mm rings?	Back pocket?
Aston	4	1 full-height	yes	no	yes	no
Baroque	5	3 full-height plus note-pad pocket	yes	yes	yes	no
Cavendish	4	2 full-height	yes (on back)	no	no – 15mm	yes
Classic	4	2 full-height	yes	no	yes	no
Mulberry (Loki)	4	2 full-height	yes (but v small)	mostly	no -15mm	no
Portland	4	1 full-height	yes	yes	no – 15mm	no
Urban (possibly)	4	1 full-height plus note-pad pocket	yes (on back)	?	yes	yes

You’ll see added to the table an Urban, which I don’t actually have as yet, but am bidding a miniscule amount on, on eBay. It might have the layout and functionality I want (I would need to see how flat-as-a-bat it is if I win it) but will I love it? It’s not leather and it’s a bit dull-looking. I suppose if I win it, I could potentially decorate it so that it looks less drab.

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...?

 [569... still counting]

Filofax pros and cons: pocket size and smaller

Well, in the first post of this series, I covered the A5 filofaxes I have and was somewhat gratified to realise that I use most of them. In the second post, I covered the personal filofaxes and two Mulberry A6 binders I have. Most of them aren’t in use and I might well sell a couple of them.

In this post, I will cover the pocket filofaxes and smaller.

Here we go:

Type	Pros	Cons	Current use/location	Selling?
Aston in orchid	Pretty colour; 19mm rings; 4 card slots and other useful pockets	Slightly dry feel to the leather; doesn’t quite lie flat	Unused Bottom drawer of my desk	Probably. I used it for a while and got on well with it, but if I’m going to use a pocket filofax, I think it would be the Baroque
Black Baroque	19mm rings; 4 card slots plus other pockets; lies flat-as-a-bat	Slightly useless zipped pocket	Unused Bottom drawer of my desk	No
Red Classic	Fantastic colour; 4 card slots; other useful pockets; 19mm rings	Does not lie flat; card slots quite stiff	Unused Bottom drawer of my desk	Probably (make me an offer!)
Black Cavendish	External pocket (like a wallet); external zipped pocket; four card slots	Does not lie flat; 15mm rings	Unused Bottom drawer of my desk	Not sure
Black Portland	Four card slots; zipped, gusseted pocket; lies flat-as-a-bat; gorgeous leather	Black, so not bright enough for me; 15mm rings	Hubby uses it	No
Red Portland	Four card slots; zipped, gusseted pocket; lies flat-as-a-bat; gorgeous leather; fabulous colour	15mm rings	Unused Bottom drawer of my desk	No
“Loki” Green patent leather Mulberry	Four card slots; gorgeous leather	15mm rings; card slots a bit stiff; zipped pocket too small	Unused Bottom drawer of my desk	Maybe; I do love it (but will probably never use it...)
Pink mini Baroque	Four card slots (in a mini!!); other useful pockets; fabulous colour; gorgeous leather	Small! Zipped pocket not useful	Unused Bottom drawer of my desk	I was about to type Probably, then went and looked at it to check the pockets and now the Probably has become a probably not!

So, that’s another eight binders, many of which I don’t want to sell and none of which are in use at the moment (and of them, only really two are potentially usable by me – the red Portland and the black Baroque). Why do I find it so hard to let them go? With the pockets, I think it is because I wonder if I might go back to a planner plus a wallet – the reason they don’t work for me is because I try to combine the two and they are just too small. If I went to planner plus wallet, the 15mm rings wouldn’t be a problem. But also, I think I am just an inveterate hoarder!

Anyway, as of today, I am the owner of 7x A5 filofax, 2x A5 Mulberry, 7x personal filofax, 2x A6 Mulberry, 6x pocket filofax, 1x pocket Mulberry, 1x mini filofax. Total:26

Gulp.

Stop buying them!

DID I downsize to 15mm rings?

No.

Moving on...




What, you want the gory details?

Oh... Alright then.

The card holders did for me. They always do. By the time they were on and the cards were in the slots and the duplex diary with notepaper interleaved were in, it seemed pretty full. The address book would have fitted well in the slot behind the cards, but then the back was getting a bit bulky and then I couldn’t find anywhere sensible to put vouchers... and in rummaging around in the bottom drawer of the desk where the massive filofax party has been going on for MONTHS, I saw Red and then I was tempted to move back into her, since she started bleating on about, “well, if the card slots are filling it all up and you’re only using it because it’s red, then what about me?? What about ME???”

So I shifted everything back to the Baroque. If I ever move back to a planner plus wallet system, I would use the Portland in a heartbeat, but to try and combine the two functions in a 15mm ring binder seems beyond me.

Oh, and I've also recently acquired a navy blue Portland in personal. More on that soon...

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.

Can I downsize to 15mm rings??

As I said in my last post, I have bought a red pocket Portland with the somewhat significant drawback of it possessing 15mm rings. Can I downsize to move into it? I am currently using a 23mm ring personal Baroque, so it’s a tough challenge!

The main things on the rings are the diary, addresses and card-holders. The amount of space I have for notes is relatively small. So, can I move to smaller versions of any of these?

Diary:
Well, this is always a bit of a nightmare for me. I like to be able to see a week at a time, otherwise I don’t have an overview and I’m just lost. BUT, I also have to have my to-do/notes page for the week visible when I open my filofax, because even if it only a page away and marked really, really clearly, there is some part of my brain that just ignores it and I don’t look at it. The upshot of that is, that I really need a week + notes format. Can I manage that in something as small as a pocket? That’s the bit that remains to be seen. I know I can cope with a pocket week to view, size-wise, as I have done it before. The week plus notes by filofax wastes far too much real-estate for me to get it. I’ve said before that my diary needs are pretty simple. I need the date range across the top and the day and date on the day space. I don’t need the mini-calendar thing, I don’t need umpteen languages, my work doesn’t recognise most of the UK Bank Holidays so I sure as heck don’t need to be reminded how many OTHER people in the world are on holiday each day. I can tell what the moon looks like by looking at it and couldn’t care less whether it is full or not (photographer hubby does!).

I’m also pretty handy with word-processors and mail-merge stuff so I could make my own diary. I normally prefer my week per page to be lined, but a week per page pocket would be too small for this.
I’ve also realised that I don’t actually need the notes pages in more than a month ahead, so I could duplex-print the diary and just insert a lined page between the weeks at the start of the month. Anything needing noting more than a month ahead could go in the coloured monthly pages I have for advanced planning. I don’t mind that the week changes sides each week. For a full year, the diary section could then be:
26 pages of week per page (52 weeks, duplex-printed)
12 pages for monthly planning
2-3 pages of notes for the weeks, inserted between the weeks (again, these can be used on each side)
1 page for ‘beyond 2013 planning’
Total: 41 pages

Card-holders:
As I like my binder to be wallet and planner, being able to carry cards easily is essential. The Portland has four card slots in the back cover, but I generally want to carry a whole heap more than that and this is where the 15mm rings might struggle. Each card-holder can hold an additional four cards. I need two more card holders and they take up a LOT of space on the rings.

Addresses:
This might be less of a problem soon as I am about to buy a smart phone (yes, as in I haven’t possessed one before now). Until then, I could use the address book that came with the Flex as it could tuck in behind the card pocket in the back.

The project notes and capture notes are fairly small in number – maybe 20 in total, so in theory, this is all feasible.

But, as I said in my last post, there is the significant danger that trying to squeeze into a red Portland will only trigger me to move back into the red Mulberry.... it’s red, it has the same number of card slots as the Portland but it has a bigger page size and a better page format.

Watch this space!

Review of the red pocket Portland

I had a black pocket Portland a while back, but I gave it to hubby in the great ‘convert the uninitiated’ scheme (he’s still using it!) and I had expected my ‘new’ red Portland to be identical to the black Portland in everything except colour.
Wrong.
I’ll get to the difference in a bit.

General walk-through:

Cover
It’s a nice red leather. There are a couple of marks but nothing serious and nothing a bit of polish and a quick brush-up won’t remedy. The leather isn’t as ‘grippy’ as the black version (but the black one may have been the one that’s different and all other Portlands are more like this one). This one feels much more like my green personal size version.

Front cover

Back cover

Inside
The left-hand interior has a gusseted (great word!) pocket, which is where the difference from the black version is. In the black one the edge of the pocket makes a cover for the zipper, but in my red one, there is a flap to cover the zipper. I wonder when and why they changed? Does anyone know.
The pocket is lined with red material ‘watermarked’ with the filofax f.

Inside

Flap covering zipper

The right-hand interior is the same as the black version – four card slots with a full-height pocket behind. The interior is lined with the same red material as the zipped pocket.

Card slots

There is no full-width pocket along the back (unlike in the Cavendish).

The rings are 15mm (I almost weep as I write this because we all know deep down that I will not be able to make this work as a planner and wallet combined). They are quite stiff, but I’m fairly sure the binder hasn’t had a lot of use. All of the rings are perfectly aligned.

It came with just a few things – a week on one page 2014 calendar, a today marker, a set of post-its and two top-opening clear pockets (one crystal clear, the other the softer, slightly opaque plastic).

I have made a week on one page diary for the remains of 2013 for it – I will post about it soon!