Punching and cutting, getting ready for new arrivals

Tonight I've been busy preparing some more paper for my Bond at work. I bought a pad of 60g lined paper without any holes on my way home from work today. It's nicely perforated at the top and comes out a5. And then I punched all hundred sheets! See?

When I was done, I was still itching for some more DIY... I decided cut up some pocket size paper in preparation for some new Filofax arrivals this week. That's right. Not one. Some. Three actually. So far. 

Last week I kept myself busy on Tradera, the Swedish subsidiary of Ebay, carelessly placing lazy (low) bids on items that looked even remotely interesting. Since they are Filofaxes, nearly all of them are interesting... I never thought I would win them for the price I was willing to pay, at least not that many! 

Don't tell my family :-) but this week I will get three lovely parcels containing:

• a red pocket Finsbury
• a chestnut pocket Cuban
• a brown pocket Kendal

I have already started making plans for them, naturally...

Oh, and by the way - I'm so pleased with Dahle, the paper cutter! It's a dream to work with. Sturdy, easy to use and oh, so good at avoiding fanning. If you are considering one, I would definately recommend it!

As you can see the pocket paper is not punched yet, and that's because I haven't got a pocket hole punch (yet). It's on its way too, and then I'll make confetti to celebrate my new filofaxes!

Keep your fingers crossed I'm not as lucky with the rest of the auctions, the ones that haven't ended yet... On second thought - don't keep your fingers crossed. I want them :-)

Meet Bond, A5 Bond...

I found an ad for a brand new unused, very reasonably priced, A5 Bond, and I bought it... My though was to use it for work, as my stay-at-work planner. It arrived in the mail today! Here he is!

It's the same model as the one I used for my son's Birthday project. He seems to be in good shape, the rings are looking well (fingers crossed there). It doesn't lay flat when opened, but I'll work on that.

It may be a little out of character and a perhaps a little mean to Mr Bond, but I wanted a filofax that wasn't pretty enough to distract me from my actual work. Anything in genuine leather would have me stroking it and sighing instead of planning... Grown up decision, eh?

The set-up 
I will use it for taking notes in meetings, for pen-and-paper planning, for keeping reference material handy and action lists for my different projects. I will also keep track of hours spent on different projects. I am not sure I'll want to use the generic calendar, rather loose sheets for the week at hand when I'm busy with a particular project (they usually don't overlap). My work requires some travelling, and I have spent too many hours offline in an airplane without access to some important piece of information I needed... No more!

My preliminary sections/dividers:

• Inbox
• Meeting notes
• Next actions
• Waiting for
• Project 1
• Project 2
• Project 3
• Project 4
• Later
• Someday/maybe
• Reference material
• Email addresses and phone numbers for my colleagues and clients
  (good to have on paper as well as digitally)

I think that's it! I'll give you an update on how I progress with my work set up.

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!