Fix the Design

Property of Stormberry

Today, at the monthly Philofaxy Meeting, we discussed a little a small issue I have with the weekly inserts from filofax: the mini calendar. My issue with this calendar is that I don't use it, but I could use the space it is printed on. You won't see it in the picture I've enclosed because I have whited it out and written on top of it with a ballpen. So, you would say that it isn't really a problem, because I have already fixed it: I put white-out on it and wrote over it. Done. Well... yeah... but no.

The Mini Calendar

In this particular insert I'm using - this is the cotton cream week on two pages that came with my planner - the mini calendar is actually the smallest that comes in the weekly inserts offered by filofax, or so it seems to me. This calendar is presented in a vertical format, where each line is a day, so you get from five to seven columns in each little calendar (depending on the number of weeks each month has), while if the calendar had a horizontal format, with each day taking a column (plus a column for the week number) you will invariably have an eight column calendar.

Photo property of Stormberry.
Design by filofax

The calendar takes also the inner part of the page, where writing due to the rings is harder. So, technically, the design is sensible.

The thing is - for me - that I use this space to write up my weekly tasks, and I use two columns: one in black for work related tasks, and one in green or turquoise or some similar color, for tasks related to my studies. Each week I take the page out and migrate my unfinished tasks from the previous week to the new one.

I like writing each week the task list mainly to have a record also about my progress but also to see which tasks are taking longer to complete. It's not so much a productivity tracker as a way to measure the difficulty some tasks take, so that I can plan better for the future. However, my handwriting isn't as small as to be able to fit two lists in the remaining space, which is why the calendar had to be eliminated. The white out was my first option, but as it happens, it doesn't work well with fountainpens or my felt tip pens, nor highlighters. Then I started using post-its cut to size or planner stickers I could write on, but that threatened to add bulk down the road. I could also write over it, but it wasn't as readable as I would have wanted it to be.

I also made a list of the tasks in a separate division, but I was hardly looking at it, and the point of the list was to see it everyday, each time I glance at my planner - which is often - so that I remember what I still have to work on. I have also made post-its with the tasks, that travel forward each week, but they I can't look back to previous weeks to see what I've been working on.

Solutions, solutions

What I've come up, so far, is the realization that, most likely, I'll have to print out my own inserts... as I have been doing for ages. I know the current layout works for me, and I already have templates for it from previous years. However, I want to try out new layouts as well, which is why I have decided to create some adjusted versions of the plotter weekly and two versions of a vertical weekly to try them out. I've printed a test week, as I've been doing with some tests I have been running on other designs previosuly, and I'll see if I can fit my schedule and my requirements in them.

The of "planner peace" is quite an elusive one, and in a world so full of options, everything seems to be working to keep people away from finding their sweet-spot in anything. With planners, things might be a tad trickier because people change and with it their plans and how they plan, and that's ok. This is why I think that taking the time to plan, to be clear with what we need is important. This is also why I love ring binder planners, because I can still use the same binder and add into it the kind of insert that will serve me the best (hopefully) for a while, and I can change it, improve it, as time goes on.