My husband and I met up recently for lunch and had a little planning session.
Girl planner came out.
Man planner came out.
It makes my teeth hurt!
I waltzed him quick smart around to the stationers and showed him his choices : Leuchturm, Moleskine, mini Filofax, own brand knock off notebook. I could even live with a Silvine for goodness sake.
" But what would I write in it?"
All the stuff you put on crappy bits of crumpled paper!!
A few days ago noodling about the Webfinds on Philofaxy I came across the useful item that is the Frankin Covey Pouch Page Finder. Its a plastic pouch inside which you can slip an insert. ( If it was your blog please leave a link in the comments below as I forget who was writing about it now).
Hmm. How hard can it be to make something like that?
Not very. ( Although very hard to photograph! ) Here's how. You need two laminating pouches and a laminator.
1. Send a pouch through the laminator with nothing in it so you get a nice double strength plastic.
2. Cut out a piece the height you want and double the width. Dont forget that the rings mean you need it a little wider than the width of paper you want to put inside it.
3. Fold the cut out piece to form the pouch shape. It will be springy and not want to stay flat so send it through the laminator again in its folded state. The heat effectively presses it flat.
4. We now need to seal the bottom to form a pouch. To do this send another pouch through the laminator with the open edge of the pouch going through last. Insert the bottom end of your page finder into the open edge of the empty pouch just as it goes through the machine. You want to catch about a centimeter or so of the page finder between the empty pouch to seal it.
5. Trim, punch holes and cut tiny bits from between the inside edge and the holes as on a Filofax ruler and Voila! Pouch page finder.
If you want a tab you can either make the pouch longer and trim a tab from the plastic itself, or you can put the tab on your insert. I used a magnetic bookmark on mine. You can see mine still has blank paper stuck nt grey card in it. This does obscure the pages below but it occurs to me that you could print or write a list on an OHP transparency and stick it in the pagefinder to get a sort of overlay effect.
Having made it to prove I could, I now find myself considering how to use it. My initial thought before I am starting was that it was perfect for recurring tasks and goals.
But now it occurs to me that it would also be useful for planning ahead gym training sessions if you need to remember target heart rates for interval training or which weights exercises you are to do that session. Insert the training plan ahead of time and when you get to the gym, snap it out, lock the filofax in the locker and take the pouch in with you.
Or I know several people are on diets and have separate health filos. This could be a food diary in your daily planner. Ditto for people recording their daily spending and running a finance filofax.
Or it could have motivational quotes, a prayer list, a shopping list.. Anything really. What would you use it for?
I am not someone who personifies inanimate objects. I do not name my filofaxes. Not least because I probably couldn't remember the list. ( Which reminds me of one mother I represented when her eighth child was being taken into care. I checked the child's name with her as it seemed there was a typo in my case papers because the name of this child was the same as her first. But no. She said that she "Had just forgotten that she had already used that name.")
But, there is an exception to every rule and I noticed that my newly acquired Crimson Malden was definately a Miss Malden and had to be set up accordingly. From the outside she is Miss Malden in the way that barristers are always called Miss by their clerks. She is neat and discrete and professional.
But, inside she is a Miss as in Driving Miss Daisy. She is vintage. Not vintage as in what used to be second hand. Vintage as in having old style grace and elegance. She is a lady still living in an antebellum manision in the Carolinas and wearing gloves to lunch. Don't ask me why. She just is. She belongs to an age gone by. And so, on the inside I dressed her accordingly with trimmed down postcards from www.zazzle.com glued o grey card.
Fortunately work has started. The roof work to change a flat roof over garage and porch to a less ugly pitched one comes first before the garage is converted
However, having started it stalled again on Friday with one builder off because he pulled his back the day before ( probably, to be fair because he was working hard in freezing conditions) and the other went home after the tile delivery because his budgie was dying!!
But fabric design waits for no budgie and over on Tea and Talk for Two I have posted photos of the surface design work I did last night in the so called 'dry studio'. I do have a bathroom up there but the sink is made for looking pretty and allowing you to clean your teeth not for washing up inky screens. I have to fill plastic boxes of water, take them to my worksurface and washup in that until the water gets dirtier than the utensils. Then I lug it back and pour it down the toilet.
It works fine despite the midden in which I end up when I am in in a creative maelstrom. Or usually it does...
I was in the studio until the early hours yesterday so I was prettty tired for the final pouring away. Which is the excuse I gave when I confessed to Dennis that I saw, a tad too late, a plastic tablespoon vanishing down the Ubend! I am a bit worried as the plumbing in the loft only just has the required fallaway degree to make a macerator unit not necessary but I have flushed a lot and all seems to be well.
But the sooner I get my steel double sink and spray tap fitted the better!
As you can see the appointments page is divided by a gap into two columns. I don't have that many appointments in my personal planner so I have been using the right column each night to do a resume of the day. This is great for spotting where time is wasted and recognising where nice but unplanned things happened. I tend to focus on what I did not get done rather than my achievements so this also encourages me to look at my day with more balance.
Having numbered to do boxes helps me not plan to do more than is reasonable. And I find that I now do as we do at work when a day is full of appointments, i.e drawing a line through the remainder of the space ( or adding a line of washi tape. No more tasks today!
The notes section I am using for my new Focus practice. I have written all about that here on my Plan • Create • Succeed blog so I will not repeat myself here save to say it is working wonderfully.
I use two magnetic bookmarks from City Organiser here. I bought them in a whim last week becuase I broke the London Skyline ruler that came with the Lineburst Filo and I missed that design from the Olympics. They work great to tab the list I am focusing on this week and move around easily.
This Non-Filofax has pockets galore. For now I have used the backslots for my RAC breakdown card and European Health insurance card but also to write down on cards my overarching goals for the year any my focus words etc. Behind that is a tube map and behind that you can see the spine of a Moleskine Volante notebook I am using as a sketchbook. More on that in another post. There is a full width pocket behind the rings too which is empty at the moment. For a personal this is the best design for quanity and capacity of pockets. I love it but I am glad I have others I love that I can rotate with it because I dread it wearing out! i am sure I will add stuff as the year goes on.
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