Kendal disappointment

This is what happened on my THIRD day using Kendal.

The weight of a coin dropping towards the bottom of the pocket made the mesh net fray and come loose from the seam. Anyone else who has had this problem? 

Writing real estate in Kendal

One of the new arrivals turned out to be a PERSONAL Kendal instead of the POCKET Kendal I thought I was bidding on. Ah well, it's still beautiful!

Very beautiful actually. The leather ages with grace, and I think I'll like it even more with time. And being used to a Guildford slimline I'm completely head over heels in love with the ring size, too! 23 mm instead of 11! I decided I want to use it as a notebook, only the personal paper size is too small for me. And there seemed to be so much space around the edges?

...so I made my own. Slightly bigger than personal. The width at the bottom is 10,5 cm (a6 width) and the length is 18 cm. I got three sheets out of each a4.

 This is how it compares to a personal size sheet.

Punching was a little tricky, but I removed the plastic ends on the puncher so there was no obstacle for the paper.

Filled to the brim and ready to go! I love how much writing real estate there is in here!

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!

Moveable action lists

I dearly love my A5 Raspberry Finsbury, and she (yes, it's a she...) is my main Filofax. But she is heavy, and I can't bring her along wherever I go. My action lists need to go with me, however.  I also want to be able to carry them in both my mini and my personal. So I decided on a format that works well for me:

It's basically a mini page, and I punched it with the mini hole punch. All the holes have little slits in them so they can be lifted off the rings. As you can see, this page will not fit in a personal, so I cut off the corner.



When I process my inbox I write my action lists, and when I'm at home, they stay in my A5, and when I go out I move them to either the mini or the personal.

What about you, do you move information between your organisers daily?

Removeable notes

I don't know if there is anyone else out there who doesn't really like opening the rings of you filofax, but I don't! I'm always worried things will fall out or that the mechanism will wear out too soon, and instead I just let things stay where they are, which sort of defeats the purpose of a filofax... And when I eventually muster up enough courage to open the rings I have a lot of reorganising to do.

So I cut out little squares of paper, and punched them with three holes so that they will fit into all my organisers (mini, personal and A5) and made small slits from the punched holes so they can be removed from the organiser without opening the rings. I have blank pieces in all my organisers and keep stacks of them around the house and in my office, too.

I use these mostly for GTD inbox/bucket style notes. Whenever I think of something I need to put in my inbox I jot it down. Later I just pull the notes out from all the organisers (and my pockets!) and put them in my inbox. 

Most of them are torn up when they end up rewritten as items on a next actions list, but this one was added as a reminder in my calender. See? 

Of course I have to be careful and make sure the slits are not too worn if I reuse it, but most of the time they are ok being moved a few times. 

Hole punchers

I've got the filofax hole punchers for mini, personal and A5. I still can't believe I actually put out so much money on them as I did, a fact I do my best to try and forget. They're really too expensive. And useful.

Hello world, and Meet my darlings!

I'm Maria and I love my stationery.

I've had a passion for all things pen and paper since I was a little girl. This fact is so well established that it even made it's way into my sister's speech at my wedding (she used it as a proof of my character)... I am sure you understand :-)

I'd like you to meet my Filofaxes: from the top: a mini Finsbury in black, Guildford slimline (also in black) and Roxy, my lovely Raspberry Finsbury A5.

I bought my first filofax many years ago when I was at university, and I used it for years until the mechanism broke. It was a black slimline, I am not sure which model but it might have been a Finsbury, the leather was very similar. I bought as many inserts I could afford at the time, and felt very grown up using it.

A few years later, when my boys were young, I didn't feel I had the need for a big organiser and that was when I got the mini Finsbury instead of simply a replacement for the first when it fell apart. There wasn't much room for anything bigger in the diaper bag anyway. The black mini has cute bite marks my son made once..

When I went back to work I needed more room for notes, and so I got the slimline Guildford. Since I had used that size before I thought it would work, and it did for a while, but there's simply not room enough for notes. We have four boys and my life no longer fits into a personal/slimline size filofax!

Now I use the A5 Finsbury (Roxy) for everything personal and family related, and sort of the hard outlines of my work schedule (trips, project deadlines etc). Roxy stays at home, but I carry my action lists with me in the Guildford or mini Finsbury to work or when I'm out on errands.

Oh, and I live in Stockholm, Sweden.