Birthday project

I thought I'd try and instill some healthy (?) organisational habits in my son, and what better way than giving him his first filofax? My boy turned 13 last week and I am sure he would much rather have found Assassin's Creed III gift wrapped than this beauty, but parenting is very often about giving children what they NEED rather than what they WANT, right? 

Problem no 1: which binder? I didn't want it to look too grown up, too exclusive or too expensive. Not too childish either, he is after all a teenager now. I settled on a Personal Bond, and he actually likes it very much. Yaaay!

Problem no 2: What about his school schedule? His schedule isn't the same every week (some classes are only every other week and some once a month) and his schedule is printed on an A4 and can be a bit tricky to decipher. No point in just adding a copy of that to his filofax. 

When I went to school I used to draw my schedule in a note book, one week on two pages for every week of the school year. So I added class specific text boxes in the undated monthly personal Word template (after moving the columns and merging a little) and added mail merge tags from the DatesSourceFilo_WOTP_CC. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the templates and source files at pHILOFAXY!!

Problem no 3: Week numbers. His school uses week numbers for everything, so natually his week view would need to include week numbers. After fiddling with the source files and templates adding week numbers to the template and excel file felt pretty straight forward, so I did! 

Then came the fun part. Making dividers! I bought a pile of magazines with nice photographs in them and glued them to paper and copied the shape of the dividers that came with the binder. I wrapped them in book wrapping plastic and punched them. That almost wrecked my nerves, the plastic got stuck in the puncher and  this racoon grinned at me for ever when I struggled to get this particular divider unstuck! 

Problem no 4: A teenager with a filofax? Will it work? I have no idea. But he's already using it, which is a good sign. See the jot pad notes in above? I flipped them over so you can't see what he's written (and I have his permission to post these pictures, btw :-)) but that's proof he's using it!! Time will tell if he'll continue using it and if he'll develop the same obsession interest as his mother. His younger brother has already asked me when he will get his own filofax, and wants one exactly like his brother's. So I have high hopes at least one of them will be a filofax user!