Week 1 in the pocket

At the beginning of this month I challenged myself to stick to a pocket size for the whole month. I’ve now been in a pocket filofax for a week, and I thought it may nice to do weekly reviews of how I’m coping. I used the layout of my personal sized filofax as a starting point and tried to keep the same sections. Of course some things had to be adjusted. Let’s dive in!

I picked the Malden to start with. This is because of the large rings size, and the back full length pocket. I was trying to use it as both a wallet and planner.

Set up:

When you open her up, you see only a few cards in there, and some highlighter page markers. In the zip pocket I kept coins.

The first section holds my perpetual calendar that I use to keep track of birthdays, and also the month on two pages which I had already from last year when I got “Succes” (a dutch brand) inserts. Before this challenge I was using these in my “satellite” planner.

Next comes my week on two pages, and then a day per page. For the day per page, I recycle old 2014 week on two page inserts and put washi tape on the top to write the date on. I didn’t have a day per page section in my personal size but I realised that I would need that in my pocket size as the week to view is just too small to write down everything. I use this day per page format in my satellite planner as well. So far it’s working well, and I like that I’m recycling :). 

After that comes the “to do” section where I am keeping a running list of things that I shouldn’t forget to do or add into my scheduling. Not all of it is time sensitive but the things that are, gets transferred into the week on two pages. So this section acts almost as a brain dump of sorts.

The next section is what I call the “info” section. Right now all I have in it are the info sheets from the Succes brand, similar to what you would get in filofax inserts (conversion charts, national holidays, international phone number codes, etc). In my personal size, I also carried in that section a chart with the school calendar, and the times of the tram lines I use the most. I haven’t been able to fit that into this section yet. I will see what I have to do about that coz this week I realised that I refer to at least the school calendar regularly.

The last section is a notes section/ A-Z filing section. Any notes that I want to keep get’s filed under the relevant letter. In the back I put papers or receipts that I want or need to keep. At the moment it also has some page markers that I made which I need to laminate and use. I kept it there as a reminder for me to do that. In the full length back pocket I keep paper cash in.

Review:

1. I’m really missing the personal size binders…maybe I should hide them. lol

2. The zipper is annoying to get coins out from.

3. Perhaps get rid of info section if I can’t fit my school calendar in there, and replace it with finance section. I need to track my finances!!!

4. Make more use of A-Z tabs, perhaps file info section things into the a-z section.

5. Make more use of day per page: I found that this week I didn’t use the day per page so much (even though I probably should have) to keep myself more organised and focussed. 

6. Try to make it more appealing: this week it was all about function and trying to make it work. But although I really love the look and feel of the pocket Malden, I didn’t use it all that much. I think I need to make the insides more appealing. Now I know I can’t put stickers everywhere as I am already limited in space. But perhaps I can decorate with function in mind. Use colours for colour coding, like I do in my personal size. Stuff like that.

Conclusion:

So using the Malden as a wallet and planner was a complete fail. It was soooo frustrating. So I will not be combining the two. So perhaps I can put the school calendar in the back pocket…we’ll see. I will keep some coins in the zip pocket just to have some coins on hand in case of anything. I will keep on using the Malden for one more week, trying to make some improvements based on what I have observed already.