A Blank Slate

Last week I spent a couple of hours preparing a post about what I was going to do to save my planning system. In this post I had claimed that until the end of the year I would be using a personal Filofax (never worked for me, highly doubt it ever will). My reasoning was that it was portable, should I get that elusive PT job and it would look good. For some reason I put off posting it. Towards the end of the week I realised why I had put it off.

I love the idea of a stuffed Filofax. The sight of a Filofax with bits of paper sticking out makes me go all funny. However, there is no point in me gathering together enough inserts to pack one of my binders full to bursting if I don’t really know what I want.

I realised that the idea of the Filofax was better than the reality at the moment.  What I really needed was to start from scratch and let my days dictate what system I used rather than try to make my days fit around the inserts I had.

Then I thought of the post on philofaxy about bullet journaling. I watched the video and decided that I would have a go at something similar. Once I had made the decision it seemed obvious what I should do. I wrote a list of information and everyday stuff I liked to carry around. Everything that wouldn't go in a notebook I put in the pocket Chameleon. It kind of ended up like my pocket Malden but without diary, notepaper and vast amounts of lists.  

Next, I rifled through my significant pile of ‘notebooks that are too good to use’ and found the exact notebook I wanted. I had briefly considered filling a binder with notepaper and using that but knowing me I would faff about with dividers and moving pages around, rewriting and taking pages out. I like the idea that it will be a record of what works and what doesn’t work. It will be a record of formats I have tried and how they evolve. About an hour later I had prepared myself to settle in the notebook for the rest of the year. It was quite an eye opener to see that given a blank slate I designed a format completely different to the one I had been using previously.

I have only been using this system for a few days but I reckon that even if it doesn’t become my permanent system it will definitely show me what I want from a planner.

My next post will be a closer look at the details of this current system.