05 January 2009

New Year, New Filofax

Hard to believe that I haven't posted since before Christmas! But the holidays are now truly over, and I'm back to work, including blog work!

One of the things I did during my time away was to start using my new chocolate Personal Finchley Filofax. I left the Personal Finsbury—a bright red thing—pretty much as it was and just copied any information I needed into the new organizer.

The new Filo has had an interesting effect on me, and much more of an impact than I could have imagined. The change of color to a soft brown cover with smooth cream paper makes me feel calm, quiet, and somehow more focused. It made me put aside my turquoise Pocket Finsbury, too, in favor of a small Moleskine diary for my fitness records. It has everything to do with the similarity in color of the cotton cream Filofax paper to the Moleskine paper. I've even abandoned my colorful Miquelrius journals for my personal journaling. (I've brought them into work where I can use them as an adjunct to the A5 Filo I use for work. They may even encourage me to take more and better work notes.) Yes, I've gone back to using a large ruled Moleskine for journaling.

(But I won't post any Moleskine pictures here. That's just crossing a line.)

I also took the Filofax switch as an opportunity to simplify things. I only use 2 tabs, one for to-do pages (alphabetical by category: calls, errands, Philofaxy, etc.), and another with ruled cotton cream notepaper. I then use the A-Z tabs for both phone numbers and alphabetical lists. For example, my Christmas list will go behind "cd". I hand-copied the phone numbers I'll need onto the cotton cream address pages, which gave me the chance to clear out the ones I no longer use. It's amazing how few I really need to carry.

Here's to a great year of life and Filofaxing to everyone!